Two Can Also Play

One gripe I will always have with your average nollywood movie’s character writing is the concept of absolutes. Good characters are always absolutely good. Good to the point of frustrating naivete. Bad characters are always absolutely bad. Evil to the bone and the kind that you want to push off a cliff. But have we ever heard of greys? Is a story with real characters who are as good as they are bad not more intriguing? But that’s beside the point.

Two Can Also Play is the story of a husband, Ralph (Daniel Etim-Effiong), who takes his stay-at-home wife, Elma (Mimi Chaka) for granted more and more each day to the point of infidelity. She eventually discovers this truth (hence the title) and decides to flip the script on him.

Before she discovers the truth about her husband, her long-lost friend Oge is the first to learn that her friend’s husband is cheating on her. However, instead of telling her friend she chooses to try and play the role of the Holy Spirit from the background by telling the mistress to leave the husband and attempting to get the wife to regain her self worth. I am sure this writing is supposed to appeal to the mummy G.O’s of the world but it’s hard to reconcile how this our supposedly “great friend” with a “great heart”, as Elma says time and time again, is perfectly content laughing with her friend while harboring a secret that could break her.

Having said all that, it’s a YouTube movie and ultimately it should be taken as just that. There’s no room for gripes about the elementary ways the background score transitions from one sound to another or the way certain scenes are just absolutely devoid of sound. There’s no room for criticism about the preachiness of all of the ending scenes or the fact that the concept of time is lost from the moment Elma leaves the home (in one scene sister Jane is saying Elma is so busy with work that she rarely sees her, in the next scene sister Jane is asking Elma how her first day at work). In the end, it’s simply a YouTube movie. My only real gripe is how they have our Daniel playing all these ‘bad guy’ roles nowadays. It’s like someone has an agenda to ruin his loverboy image and we won’t stand for it!