A Lot Like Love

A Lot Like Love is a lot like many other nollywood switch-it-up romances that you’ve seen before. I have thought about it, and it will be too difficult to review this movie without revealing some details hence…

SPOILER ALERT

In A Lot Like Love, 33 year old Jasmine is rapidly approaching her 34th birthday and remembers that she had promised her mother the previous year to bring a man home before 34. She starts to panic about it but just at the nick of time she meets Tyrone. Their chance meeting turns into a love story that rivals fairytales until she realizes that Tyrone is actually not who he says he is… in fact his name is not even Tyrone.

The movie is best described by dividing it into two halves – the Tyrone phase vs the Nwachukwu phase. Much like the character’s name, Tyrone, the Tyrone phase of this film is forced and unnatural for its environment. It is peppered with scenes that don’t even attempt to flow into one another or to capture the audiences emotions. Instead it goes about checking off boxes – meet random stranger, check; awkward meeting with mother, check; unbelievable love story, check; haphazard ‘caught in the act scene’, check check check. A few scenes later when Tyrone and Jasmine have supposedly fallen in love and the director has decided to bless us with the most prolonged, most unconvincing and most sudden love birds montage, you find yourself wondering if that’s all the movie has to offer.

Then enter, the Nwachukwu phase. After Jasmine discovers who Tyrone really is – aka a broke guy pretending to be rich – is when the real movie begins. My favorite part of this all was seeing Jimmy Odukoya (who plays Tyrone) get an opportunity to step out of this posh and cultured lover boy image that he is always trapped in. In A Lot Like Love, he is given this opportunity and even though he doesn’t knock it out of the park, it’s still a solid strike. Watching him blow pidgin, and loose his swagger with his walk, and cower to a woman was a delight. I cannot wait to see him do something a little more out of the box next time and push it even further the time after that.

There are two twists in this film, hence the story that we started with became something else and then something else after that, but regardless of the twists it was still not very original. It was a compilation of different Mills & Boons like scenarios. Despite this and the inconsistent audio, the unending advertisement for this “Brass & Copper” restaurant, and the questionable cinematography, it was a worthy watch just to see Jimmy’s switch up.