Hire A Woman

If a movie isn’t going to be original or have an uber magnetic storyline then it should at least be entertaining! This is a concept that producer Chinneylove Eze seems to completely understand as she returns with a follow up to her 2017 romantic comedy “Hire A Man“.

Like in the first iteration, Hire A Woman starts off as the story of someone trying to avoid an uncomfortable situation by telling a white lie. In this movie, Jide (played by Uzor Arukwe) is invited to a reunion with his university friends – of which his longtime love interest and ex is a part, and he is convinced by one his coworkers/friends to take Teni (played by Nancy Isime) along to pose as his girlfriend. As in the first movie, this lie eventually falls apart and where the lie falls a part, a true love story replaces it. Except in this version, the lovers have been scrambled up a bit.

The most entertaining parts of this movie are in the first 50-70% of the film. It’s the camaraderie, it’s the banter, it’s the light bits between the characters (including Erica Ngozi Nlewedim of BBN Season 5 fame) that make it fun to watch. It’s not anything new but there was something quite comforting about watching Nancy Isime play Teni in these parts of the movie. The character of Teni is very similar to many other Isime roles from “Hire A Man” to “The Surrogate” but in this film, the character of the “bitch” is on the right side of the narrative so she’s fun to watch and easy to love. The rest of the cast also brings in certain pillars that hold up the first half. For instance, Ekubo seems to have mastered the role of the eternal playboy/comic relief, Mike Godson brings his God-given talent of romancing to the screens here, and watching the camera romance Ifu Ennada probably won’t get old anytime soon. Uzor Arukwe as our protagonist really isn’t given much to work with as a confused used-to-be-boy who now finds himself having to navigate the uncomfortable skin of adult relationships. It’s underwhelming but at least its not painful to watch. Yes, these are our new standards.

Be that as it may though, many of these characters started off the film doing one thing and ended the film doing the exact same things with zero to no variation. In the painful scene where Mike Godson’s character attempts to have a meaningful heart to heart with his friend about love and relationships, it just comes off sounding like unnecessarily intense overly dramatic lines.

The real spotlight of the movie though is the resort that it is set in. The writers loose no opportunity to drop the name of the resort in however many scenes they are able to. Hence it’s easier to think of the whole thing as a long drawn out commercial for the resort.

In the last part of the movie, all the comedy and banter comes to a screeching halt as the writers are faced with the uphill task of eliciting weighty emotions out of a movie that has had no weight for its entire duration. And their failed attempt at this shows through as the last scenes drag and drag and drag to the final conclusion.