Cooked Up Love

There’s nothing quite like a sweet and simple romantic movie to finish up your week with, right? Right. At least that was what I thought when I hit play on this train-wreck of a movie.

In “Cooked Up Love”, a talk of the town fine Chef, played by Jimmy Odukoya, finds himself with a rapidly tanking TV show. In a desperate attempt to increase the ratings, his producer suggests that they invite guest hosts from their viewers each week. It starts off horribly, as you would imagine, but turns even more sour when one of his exes turns up on the show. When it seems like things can’t possibly get any worse, his ex is signed on to the show into a more permanent position.

There was Jimmy Odukoya. There was Desmond Elliot. There was even Bimbo Ademoye to top it all off, yet this movie still managed to crumble from the very first second. Actually, watching this was a great experience, because I never knew a romantic comedy that follows the formula to a Tee could still be an absolute bore.

Where do we start from? The story is predictable and oozing with lack of originality and the conflict that the story is centered around is entirely ridiculous. There is more conflict to be found when the two characters are carrying out their yelling match, or when aunty-too-good-for-school (our lead female character) is walking around all high and mighty, than there is in the actual conflict that the entire film is centered around.

Then there is the drama. I am not talking about the kind of drama that keeps you glued to the edge of your seat wondering what’s going to happen next. No! I’m talking about the drama that was in itself a character on this movie. In the way that right before the dramatic moments arrive, the music and the cameras basically start to shout “hey there’s about to be a dramatic moment in 3… 2… 1”.

And then there was the performances. There were two solid performances here that did fair enough and I can’t fault them and they were Bimbo Ademoye and Enado Odigie. And then there was Jimmy Odukoya. I honestly don’t remember ever seeing Jimmy Odukoya in a lead role before this but for some reason his performance in this movie made me seriously miss the Michaels (I mean either Michael Godson or Michael Ezuruonye. I’ll take anyone). And it’s not that he didn’t act very well it’s just that he can’t act. This is not an attempt at harshness for the sake of harshness but squinting your eyes, donning your foreign accent and flexing your muscles with too-tight-shirts, IS NOT ACTING. Being able to perform scenes where your character carries on casual conversations with other characters and excelling in that does not mean that the audience will feel a connection in the other moments when you tilt your head to the side and look into a babes eye while saying “I love you”.

And then there’s this video quality that never seemed to improve, or should we talk about the audio? About the fact that I had to increase my television volume to the max setting in order to hear what anyone was saying – oh and that was aside from the times I had to turn it back down and practice lip reading when the music overshadowed the dialogues. 

Now let’s talk about the conflict. When the two characters finally decide to hash things out and one is mentioning why one left and the other is mentioning how they struggled etc, I’m sitting on my couch watching the yelling exchange and the entire time I’m trying to identify the conflict but there is no conflict to be found. Then it happens, actual conflict is appended to the end but I’m not sure it quite makes up for the drabness of all that came before it.

One last question though, do you people actually cook on this show or do you just talk about the steps?