The Good Wife

My verdict: 2.5 out of 5

2015 | Drama | 110minutes 57secs | Watch here

It is always refreshing to see a Nigerian movie that does not encourage women to stay with their abusive husbands just because he said “I am sorry”. The synopsis of the movie was:

A young couple were suddenly confronted with marital problems. The husband constantly abused his wife and their only daughter but she was still the good wife nevertheless; until a shocking revelation forced her to take a far-reaching effort in her life.

This story was quite simple. An abused woman, Susan (Oma Nnadi) gets some sense and leaves her abuser, Fred (Frederick Leonard) with the help of her friend, Priscillia (Ayo Adesanya) who is also Fred’s no-nonsense cousin.

The movie was good but I think it overstayed its welcome. It should have been 30 minutes because there were so many things that were cut out and some other unnecessary things in it.

First, where was the date she had with Daniel (Daniel Lloyd), it was never shown and my question is why? Was it meant for a plot twist in the end? Also, the use of oyinbo names, why?

Nollywood needs to stop this and the annoying thing is that the only character with a Nigerian name was a ghetto uncouth woman with very little education and exposure. WTF?

Is that a way of telling people that only those kinds of people bear Nigerian names whilst the educated ones have foreign names? Nollywood! Nollywood!! Nollywood oh!!! Be very careful. Mass media has a lot of power, learn to use it wisely.

Also, Yvonne Jegede was not consistent with her quintessential Yoruba woman act. Her accent kept flip-flopping from very properly spoken English to ghetto accent infused with Yoruba and if you know Yvonne, you know that her accent is perfect.

Envelope Printing

So whenever she forgot that she was to be ghetto in this movie, we forgot as well because her accent was too ‘proper’ to be ghetto. I would commend the editors for adding translations. Every sentence and word that came out of Yvonne’s mouth was translated which was great.

The conversations were not fluid, there was some disconnect most times they spoke especially with the telephone conversations, it was as if they didn’t actually call each other. Another thing I didn’t understand was with the actors looking at the camera.

It made the movie look phony, I know they wanted to give the effect that it was the other person they were staring at but it just didn’t translate. All, I was thinking was “why are you looking at me dude? Look at the actress you are supposed to look at.”

Furthermore, I want to say this to Daniel Lloyd; dude you need to broaden your horizons man. This constant pin-prick-in-the-butt-scattered-brain-with-zero-balls characters you keep playing is starting to give you a wimpy typecast. You need to try some other types of characters; why not play an asshole or very confident person for once.

Even a ritualist could be good as well. You are an actor, you need to do more, even Patience Ozokwor has variations to her wicked typecast. Sometimes she’s a witch others she’s just ignorant or self righteous. But you, are just the same type of wimp in EVERY.SINGLE.MOVIE.

The movie was okay, something you can eat your cereal to.

Cast

Ayo Adesanya as Priscillia

Frederick Leonard as Fred

Oma Nnadi as Susan

Yvonne Jegede as Bola

Daniel Lloyd as Daniel

Directed by

Okey Zubelu Okoh

Written by / Screenplay by / Produced by

Chinney Love Eze

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