A Nigerian Christmas film? Hmm, I don't think I've ever watched one so I was curious to know what this one was about. Directed by Kunle Afolayan! Everyone who knows me and my Nigerian movies opinion know that I love Kunle Afolayan movies. I've come to trust the way he directs and I was ready for this cinematic display.
This film is new. A 2021 movie and sadly the last one with the late Veteran actress Rachel Oniga. I'll be honest and say I was unaware she'd died so I'm experiencing a sadness five months late.
A short breakdown; this is a story of a mother who wants her three boys to get married and give her grand children. There is an additional perk of owning the family house for the first son who gets married. The three sons are played by Efa Iwara(movie crush and can I add, a recurring star in many of the Kunle Afolayan films I've watched), Abayomi Alvin and Kunle Remi.
The boys are as diverse and have great chemistry with each other. They have individual lives that are very nicely explored so it doesn't feel like an uninteresting monolith of sons. This is what made me keep watching. Also, isn't it just nice to finally have a change and not have daughters struggle to get married for a reward, but instead have sons do that? You see why I'm a big fan of Kunle Afolayan? And this is terrible of me for forgetting to mention, but the writer here is Kemi Adesoye and she's phenomenal. She's written films like 'Fifty', 'the figurine', 'Phone Swap' and these are all films I've watched.
The movie also stars interesting faces like Lateef Adedimeji who plays so well as a loan shark, Ade Laoye who isn't a new face for me and indeed for anyone seriously watching Nollywood. Segilola Ogidan and Linda Osifo who were both new for me. It is actually Kunle's style to feature people who are not exactly actors in his works and this is why he is able to bring fresh faces for viewers.
There are many funny scenes as you can imagine such a premise to have. With a reward of a family home, it's easy to see how initial motivations would have sprung out of deception. Also, love is not a something you can easily predict and human emotions are not logical and this leads to certain unlucky situations like when Efa Iwara gets tagged a 'Mugu' or a fool after his online marriage proposal to Linda Osofo flops big time and when the other son, Abayomi Alvin falls in love with a married woman, played by Mercy Johnson who rejects him because of course, how could she possible leave her stable home to marry her a man much younger than her and who happens to be the son of the president in her women's group.
This of course brings me to questions. There are questionsss I have about the office relationship between Efa and his boss Linda Osifo because it was crazy to see. First, what exactly are the chances of marrying your boss who speaks to you condescendingly when she does not like your work? How they even got to date in the first place is a mystery to me and it really threw me off that the strangeness of this improper office relationship was not visible to anyone else. Also, I really found the relationship between Lateef Adedimeji and Ade Laoye hard to believe. Not just because they never shared a scene together even though they were meant to be dating, but because it just didn't make sense that someone as nice an empathetic as her character was made to be in this film would be dating a loan shark. I guess they just needed a way to link these characters together but this one really felt contrived.
I must say I really enjoyed new face Segilola Ogidan and Kunle Remi's relationship on screen. It was the most entertaining and the most fleshed out of the three. I loved the comedic mishaps, like when she invited him to what he thought was an 'all night party' which in fact turned out to be an all night prayer session :). That made me really laugh. You see Segilola was a born again sister who wanted to release a debut. She once recorded in Kunle's studio where she got her first sight of his womanizing ways. It was Kunle who owed the loan shark a lot of money which resulted in the entertaining scenes where he would appear in a unassuming but with a crazed smile to gradually take things from Kunle's studio and home as repayment for the loan.
I also thoroughly entered the big scene with the Christmas party arranged for the children and adults in the streets. These were children in what you'd consider to be the slums of Nigeria getting to experience some of the festivities others in better parts of Nigeria take for granted.
I wonder what the budget was for this film mostly because of that scene. Unfortunately, our Nigerian film news don't pay attention to such things when talking about movies, so we can only speculate.
I rate this an 8/10.
Cheers!
