Ghana Must Go

Capping off the apparent 2016 fascination with intertribal marriages was Ghana Must Go which took the conflict away from tribe vs. tribe and to nation vs. nation. In Ghana Must Go, a couple meet and fall in love in the United Kingdom, then the daughter, Ama played by Yvonne Okoro, brings her fiance/husband played by Blossom Chukwujekwu, home to meet her family. Turns out that her father has some deep-seated animosity towards Nigerians and everything that has to do with Nigeria – especially ‘Ghana Must Go’.

To be fair, we can break this movie into three parts. The beginning and introduction, the middle (aka meeting the Brigadier general father) until Nkem Owoh’s character arrives and then everything after that.

To be honest, the beginning was hard to watch. I first had to reconcile the video quality which was clearly of a lower cut than what was in the trailer but you rapidly get over that because other distractions in the movie demand your attention. At first you might think it is just IK Ogbonna that’s doing a poor job representing his characters but by the time you get to the scene where mother and son faint at the same time you begin to question what kind of movie you are actually watching. Did I miss the prompt that has this listed as satire?

Eventually you stop noticing the over exaggeration of everything and you go with the flow. You actually start feeling some sort of sympathy towards this couple. The entire cast and crew do a great job of pulling you into this world. Even though the world is ten times more dramatic than anything you are used to – you fall for it, you get used to it and you embrace it in this two hours.

And then Osuofia enters and the comedy begins. The movie truly does get better even though it tempts you to quit it after the first five minutes. At the latter end of the movie you appreciate that this truly is a comedy and not just a confused dramedy. The end is just as you would expect it there are no surprises there.

The surprises really are with the seemingly simple fixes that were allowed to slip through the cracks. It’s hard to tell if the fluctuating audio here and there as well as the non-HD picture quality was simply lost in translation from original copy to online streaming, but there’s almost no excuse for the dialogue in the ranch scene being interrupted by wind noises in the final cut. Then there’s the issue of Kwabena (IK Ogbonna’s character). Some mention was made of his character having “Nigerian blood” in him – which was a saving grace to an extent because me sef been dey wonder how this one pikin take bright like this versus all the other pikins dem – but nothing was followed through.

Considering that the movie is a comedy and not a romance, there weren’t too many scenes that required immense chemistry between Blossom and Yvonne but in the few scenes that they had to work with, they did well enough to convince. It’s hard to get past the over-exaggerations that IK’s character brought to the table, but if that was what they were going for then I guess he killed it. Kofi is sharp and funny, not so much scary, as our brigadier general and Osuofia does what Osuofia does best – he brings the laughs scene after scene.

Watch the Behind The Scenes video HERE