Painful Victory

-Originality: [2 out of 5] The main elements of the movie are centered around the same themes as your typical Patience Ozokwor movie. The only difference is that in this movie the Patience Ozokwor role is played by Ngozi Ezeonu. Arguably original and arguably unoriginal

-Predictability: [0 out of 5] Fairly predictable… (who am I kidding…) it ends like your typical Patience Ozokwor movie (hint: in the end, the bad guy loses and the good guys win)

-Directing/Editing: [2 out of 5] No major faults exempting little elements that did not just… ‘gel’ in my head. But before anything else, it’s important to note that the movie is four parts long… I watched only the last two parts… same magic! There were many many many overly prolonged crying scenes with igbo songs. Don’t get me wrong, I loooovvvee soundtracks with Igbo songs but if you are going to take up 10 minutes of my time so that I can watch Mercy Johnson roll around a car… bawling… uhm! I’m not quite entertained so… fastforward. Alright, and as regards the direction… it made no sense to me that the car did not ‘jam’ Mercy Johnson, yet the driver insists on taking her to the hospital and then the doctor now proceeds to give her drugs. Drugs for what? The imaginary internal bleeding she must have acquired when she surreptitiously sat in front of the car when it did NOT jam her… puh-lease. It didn’t make sense to me either that Ngozi Ezeonu’s so called ‘beyond rich extremely busy businessman’ of a husband would not only travel with his daughter for a competition but also stay the entire 3 days of it considering his busy schedule. A tad bit unrealistic in my opinion.

-Acting quality: [3 out of 5] Mercy Johnson as usual has a tendency to blow us all away on screen. Take for instance this scene in the movie. Mercy’s dad has just died. His wife Chinwe starts bawling and weeping and bawling some more, and quite frankly, I wasn’t moved at all. I was nonchalant about his character’s death and I was nonchalant about his wife’s sorrow. But as soon as Mercy started crying…. hmm, even a witch’s heart would melt. Chinwe Owoh and Ngozi Ezeonu are legends for a reason. Kyrie Ekwenze, not exactly star material as of yet but she carried her role well enough. I’ve seen better kid actors so there really isn’t an excuse for a child on screen to have a subpar performance (see: Imogen Hogg from “Trinity” and the little female child actor from “Little Angel” starring Oge Okoye and RMD). Queen Nwokoye! I honestly have no problem with her acting as long as she is not in a ‘gra gra’ role. When given proper scripts and normal human roles, she does an amazing job. Ken Erics! I saw a list sometime this week, somewhere online, called “Upcoming Nollywood Actors to watch” and I saw his name on the list and I was thinking “it’s about time someone other than me realized his awesomeness“. Amazing on screen performance. He literally becomes his character. In fact, I’ve personally seen about 20 Pope Junior Nwodo movies (estimating) and in approximately 18 of those movies, Pope plays the role of a thug/bad boy (same role Ken plays in this movie), they say practice makes perfect but this is the first time I’m seeing Ken Erics in a thug role yet he did it much better than Pope ever did!

-Setting: [2 out of 5] The set for the so called ‘national competition’ could have done with more… what’s the word… flair. It looked like a very cheaply arranged and hurriedly put together set.

-Costume/Make-Up: [3 out of 5] Good

-Video Quality: [3 out of 5] Ok

-Soundtrack: [3 out of 5] Good

-Musical Score: [3 out of 5] Nicely done