Unintentional

RED TV is best known for its web series such as “The Men’s Club” and “Our Best Friend’s Wedding“. However, this Christmas they have decided to bless us with a full length feature film. So let’s discuss just how much of a blessing or not this film was.

Unintentional is the story of Sefi Madaki (Omowunmi Dada) who seems to be the absolute unluckiest in love. She leaves Lagos for her youth service in Imo state after her boyfriend (Ladi – Tobi Bakare) proposes to another woman in front of her. On the journey over, she and her friend, Rosie (Beverly Osu), run into transportation troubles when the bus they are taking has engine problems in the middle of the road. The duo is saved by the easy-to-love Uzor (Efa Iwara) who just happens to be traveling on the same road at that time. As their journey with Uzor goes along, Uzor’s car later runs into its own mechanical issues but that just gives him more time to fall for our female lead – Sefi.

After spending a night together, Uzor is certain that he has found his wife but some miscommunication afterwards leaves Sefi to believe that Uzor is just like all the other men. She deletes his number, proceeds with her NYSC service year, and continues hating men while Uzor is in some other corner of eastern Nigeria wondering what happened to their love.

Honestly, Unintentional is not a bad movie but it is a thoroughly upsetting movie. Its upsetting because there is so much potential that is untapped here. The writer has a great idea but either the budget, time or skill does not allow it to be properly fleshed out. One of the most prevailing annoyances about this movie is the horrendous audio quality. If I said that it was hard to decipher what the characters were saying in about 90% of the movie, it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration. It is quite a wonder how a movie is able to pull off these beautiful visuals, afford these celebrity cameos, yet they can’t manage to figure out how to make a mic work… something that 12 year olds on YouTube are doing everyday.

The next annoyance is with the writing. At the beginning, it feels like the writer is determined to immerse the audience in every part of this film from the eastern soil, to the air the characters breathe and everything in between. You sense this especially with the way the exposition starts off. There’s the introduction to Uzor and his family and then the little details with his brother cleaning his car and then over to the bus with Rosie and Sefi and the palm wine visuals then panning in on the bus passengers vehemently complaining about the frequent stops. With excitement came hope but as the movie progressed that hope was dashed because the writing and story did not maintain the same energy. By the time we get to the end of the movie, people are making friends that are just thrown into the scene, people are promising gists at locations that are never mentioned, characters are essentially referring to future and past events that were never shown and thereby ruin the flow of the movie. And it’s not just the undelivered scenes that are disappointing, it’s the loss of the flow. The progression of the storyline after the trip to Owerri becomes haphazard and choppy and it looses the charm and pull that came with the story that carried you along. So the audience is left to just sit and wait for the inevitable happily ever after we all know to expect.

With a film like this, the love story would have transcended from just okay to beyond memorable if this same energy was maintained. The film already had a lot of things working for it such as the performances. From Efa to Omowunmi and Beverly, the main leads manage to keep you enthralled. Efa adds his personal charm to the romance of Uzor and almost makes it impossible for you to not root for his love. Omowunmi is quickly becoming as seasoned as it gets in flowing into a character. The real surprise here is Beverly Osu as Rosie. It’s honestly hard to take your eyes off Beverly in the scenes in which she’s involved (even when the two protagonists are in the same frame). The camera loves Beverly in this film and this is not just a testament to her beauty. She works the scenes as though the camera isn’t there and is effortless in almost all of them. It almost makes me want to see what she’s like as the main character.

Having said all this, Unintentional really is not a bad film. It’s just one with a lot more prospect than that which it finally settles for.