Unfinished Business

So the movie is coming to an end. The run time, as we can see, is 1hr 21mins and it’s about 1hr 10mins in but still no climax. Then it’s 1hr 15mins and the director is still showing me the most stretched out aerial view of a car ride that I’ve ever seen. It’s at this point that I begin to wonder if the movie has a part two, or am I missing something?

Unfinished Business is an ‘intense’ story (as the characters in the movie continuously point out) of a regular girl who meets and falls for a prince. Luckily or unluckily for her he’s also crazy about her. Our prince is played by Ray Emodi and our regular girl by Yvonne Jegede. Asides from the intensity (I mean homeboy Princey here was already talking about ‘being her daddy’ on the first date), one thing that really strikes you is the atypical nature of it all. It’s a prince charming meets a basic girl storyline but it’s not any of the formulas that you would expect. He is obnoxious but she’s not trying to tame him. He’s not extra kind, this is not Cinderella. In fact, at first it almost seemed like a nollywood 50 shades of gray.

All is well in our love story until we find out that homeboy Princey is not just married with a kid but everyone knows it and everyone is fine with it (*wide eyes* ladies, it’s getting real out here in these streets). In fact, in one scene wifey had the mistress beaten up and then she is brought in by her in-laws to apologize to the mistress in front of everyone – it’s at this point that I should have known that there are no rules in this movie.

The crazy storyline is further accentuated by our crazy performances; case in point – Ray Emodi as ‘Prince Tola’ (aka Homeboy Princey). At first you take a moment to appreciate his beauty because for most of us we’ve never seen him on screen before and the boy is fineee. However, that only lasts a moment until you begin to notice the creepiness (or ‘intensity’ as Yvonne’s character chooses to call it) that is emanating from his character. This creepiness is justifiable at the latter end of this film, for reasons that you will discover after you watch this movie, but it’s hard to explain at the beginning. Ray does a fair job attempting to portray this character but there are a lot of staggered moments in his performance that don’t flow and mesh with the fluidity of Yvonne’s performance. Because of this, he falls short time and time again.

All in all “Unfinished Business” is an interesting experience. It’s an interesting kind of storyline with a different kind of writing. It doesn’t at any point loose the viewers, it holds your attention through it all – mostly with the shock and awe factor. The production was on point but I would not have been entirely opposed to switching out the singer on that soundtrack. It’s different but still relatively predictable, it is an easy watch but it could have been more enticing with stronger performances.