You remember how you start solving an equation in the exam hall out of faith. You don’t know the detail of the formula, you can’t remember the working, but you go on, all the same, believing you might be correct in shades and there is no how you will score zero after all these efforts (the teacher can’t be that wicked na).
Then the maths teacher comes to the hall and says Question 2 is wrong, move to the next question if you are on it. We will give you more time for the others. But you refuse to cancel what you have done so far and end up submitting your paper with the erroneous answer to a rejected question.
Or you are traveling to attend an important service at the cathedral in Ihiala but you lose your way and when you realize this, you have gone too far and you do not think you have the energy, the fuel, and the time to reverse, so you decide to settle for the nearby Okija Shrine since all powers belong to God.
Or you are trying to build a bungalow and while at lintel level, you won Betnaija and hit big money and decide to go on and build a three-storey on a bungalow foundation. At the third floor lintel, your money finishes so you decide to wire light into the ground floor and pack in, and that you do.
Or you go to bring your nephew home from school and on your way, Emeka tells you it is over between us. Distraught, you come home with the wrong boy and when your sister-in-law tells you this is the wrong boy, you say, just manage him, he has a big head too.
That is what happened with “Chief Daddy 2”. They decided to make a movie and in the middle of the beginning, they had a mess in their hands and they just pushed on doing it, they sneaked in the fine actor Uzor Arukwe so we won’t notice the foulness in the pot and they did a lot of Dubai, but a mess is a mess; with one hand on their nose, they submitted this to Netflix. Netflix in a face mask just dumped the broken mortar of rotten palm fruits on us and dashed off.
In fact, I think it is generous to liken “Chief Daddy 2” to a girl who takes the wrong boy home to her brother and sister-in-law. The girl starts with a plan and is hit in the spine by bad news and she loses it. The people who made “Chief Daddy 2” had no plan. They were building off “Chief Daddy 1” which was a monumental failure.
Chief Daddy 2: How do you carry a man with a broken waist?
How do you weigh into this review, how do you weigh into a refuse dump with just a fork in your head?
You can’t call this movie a missed opportunity or call it what doesn’t kill you… or Zee Worldly without it being a praise. Because a missed opportunity might have a great concept, what doesn’t kill you may teach you something, and Zee World has storylines.
“Chief Daddy 2” directed by Niyi Akinmolayan has no concept, no storyline, and can actually kill you.
So how do you review a movie without a concept or storyline? How can someone stand without a spine? How do you carry a man with a broken waist?
Mo Abudu who owns Ebony Life films acknowledged yesterday or so, on IG, that there are “mixed reviews” of “Chief Daddy 2” and that she understands fans of Chief Daddy who feel “some disappointment”. We can start reviewing this movie from here.
Some publications referred to this as an apology. It isn’t. If it were, it was an apology two movies too late. If it were, it would be the third apology. Chief Daddy 1 is an apology; Chief Daddy 2 is an apology. It is hard to say which is worse between the two, nay between the three apologies. You may have to toss a coin.
What went wrong with the Chief Daddy 2?
It is torture to expect one to recount what didn’t work with “Chief Daddy 2”. When you have smelly palm fruits in a basin then you can’t go counting what fruits went bad. It is a bunch of rottenness. Let’s use the character of Mawuli Gavor as a body contact to all the things that went wrong.
There will be other opportunities to fight Funke Akindele and we have fought before and Patient Ozokwor, Osuofia, Joke Silva, Kate Henshaw, and Ini Edo are enjoying their retirement benefit so why beef them? You can’t possibly take Beverly Osu, Chigul, and Nedu Wazobia seriously, can you?
But Shaffy Bello should have done better. She was in “Battleground” and “Tinsel”, she should have told them how scripts work and get them to remove some poison in the movie, or just walk out as smart RMD did (They didn’t write him off and it was no shooting conflict; he saw the script and ran away).
So we settle for Gavor (I like him so my rage will be made human by my sentiment for my G).
Gavor’s character is a football star who comes to Nigeria for a charity match without sponsors on the backdrop (okay). In a charity match or training, there is nohow anyone will injure a star when he is not mad but he gets butchered with a machete of a leg (okay). He gets a hamstring which is normal with footballers. Then the script went mad.
The doctor tells him to sit out the rest of the season (don’t laugh). The hamstring is a three weeks injury, not a leg break. And no, if a footballer gets injured in his home country, he flies back to his club to be assessed and the club makes the determination. He is not told to sit out this season by a doctor in a “shithole” and “fantastically corrupt country” (quoting Gavor’s agent).
And no, you don’t just shrug off a full season of Champions League, Premier League, FA Cup, World Cup Qualifiers, AFCON, all, and just stroll off to Chigul and Nedu Wazobia’s funeral parlour. And you don’t just go off to Dubai where you conveniently learn that music star who has given Falz the Dubai connect is a Yahoo boy and that Falz and Linda Ejiofor are wasting their time in Dubai and there is no music investor for them.
Gavor’s character goes from a “superstar” to a babysitter, a half-assed music manager, and a vixen.
Imagine Ndidi or Iheanacho comes to Nigeria for a shady charity match, gets injured, does not report back to Leicester, and is seen dancing in a music video. This is laughably impossible. And don’t forget Gavor is also a saviour of a broken, foolish family just by snapping his fingers in a video call with Laila (sigh).
Gavor’s character is everything in the movie which is symbolic of the movie trying to do everything – comedy, romance, saga, travelogue, etc.
His connection with Beverly Naya is poor, stiff, irromantic. Nice one saying what he feels every time he is with her trumps the feeling of scoring his biggest goal. He never scored a 93rd-minute winner at Old Trafford or Tottenham or any goal at all at Wembly, the San Siro, Allianz Arena, and the Bernabeu. Obviously.
Mawuli Gavor’s character is a metaphor for everything that went wrong with this movie – fine face, good physique, passable acting skills marred with poor dialogues, zero characters connections, sick attempts at comedy, and a collection of misfitting scenes that someone attempted to sew together as a film.
Surely there must be something that worked in the movie(?)
It was an ordeal coming up with something that work in the movie. I had to take a walk, then a shower, then bend my brain this way and that way to come up with something that worked.
I think the scene where Broda Shaggy welcomes Falz and Linda Ejiofor’s character to Dubai is good. Watched it twice.
I think Falz acting and accent are equally frustrating and somewhat entertaining. But there is just as far as fake rapping accent and ginger can take a movie of nearly two hours. Falz broke his back trying to carry a dead horse past the line. He failed.
I think being on Netflix was a good thing so you can fast-forward some scenes which is nearly more than half of the time.
All these are not enough to save this movie from getting what it deserves, 1.5/10.
Image source: BellaNaija
