Love In A Time of Kekes

The title tells you everything you need to know. There is love inside a keke and time passes – or you hope it does. 

Love In A Time of Kekes (LIATOK) is the story of how a middle class, snobbish, and possibly psychotic (all that craze doesn’t make sense otherwise) young lady meets a Keke driver and falls in love. They meet when he tries to save her from a snatch and grab but ends up shot instead. After the incident she calls him “stupid” for risking his life, and even though the expectation is to think of her as ungrateful you can’t quite shake the feeling that she’s right. One thing leads to another, in the most incredulous sequence of events, and next thing you know they are sleeping together in his… room apartment house (the space is multipurpose like that).

It really is billed as a cute love story but many things prevent it from hitting the mark. Number one is the absolute lack of chemistry between Ijeoma Grace Agu and Kelechi Udegbe – our two leads. On the one hand, you are excited about Kelechi getting a lead role as a lover boy for a change. On the other hand though, his multiple attempts at comedy become forced and start to fall flat especially when they are randomly inserted into every consecutive scene.

Then there is the writing. There are so many gaping holes in this storyline that if we actually took a moment to deconstruct it all, we would be here all night. First of all, between the sibling characters – played by Kelechi and Eloho – why is one sibling speaking Igbo and the other one speaking Yoruba while going back to a village that you both come from. Then there’s Efa’s character of Duke whose purpose I am not really certain of. We get the idea of why he’s there but it also isn’t quite fleshed out. That eventually becomes a recurring theme in this film – lots of ideas that are not fleshed out.

In the end, LIATOK doesn’t ever graduate past the point of a decent time pass.