We went across the length and breadth of the Nigerian internet to see the reviews – and what we found for AY’s blockbuster comedy, A Trip to Jamaica is, uhm, quite interested.
Let’s dig into it.
Number 1
In AY’s 30 Days Atlanta it was tiring. In this movie, it is a chore: as tiresome as the name, Akpos (the name of the lead, AY) and the recycled tales of his famed foolishness.
While it lacked clearly in the originality of its theme; it seemed like a new advert channel for Peak milk and Globacom. But then, Kunle Afolayan’s The CEO started the trend of using movies as full-fledged advert channels. So, it is also not original on this count.
Number 2
But story is everything and this film barely has one to hang on to. The screenplay is shoddy and unsure of itself and the stars are immediately stranded on the island of mediocre jokes and bad acting. You know things are dire when even Funke Akindele is struggling to be funny.
Number 3
Again, the sound quality was really poor. I could barely hear most of the conversations, while some scenes were too loud. The Patoranking and Cynthia Morgan scenes were not even close to funny or necessary in my opinion.
When the movie ended, I was relieved, like how did I sit through this? I thought AY would surpass my expectations considering the success of his earlier movie.
If you loved “30 Days to Atlanta,’ you would definitely find “A Trip to Jamaica” less interesting!
The fact that this is what most have come to expect from Nigerian comedy films is rather disheartening. The formula for a comedy like this is; you put your peculiar/funny character (in this case Akpos) in a serious situation (the criminal underground) and watch all the craziness and hilarity unfurl before your eyes as said character uses his wackiness and various idiosyncrasies to get out of the situation. A Trip to Jamaica doesn’t take this prime opportunity to be comedy gold. It instead chooses to be a nearly two hour long Peak Milk/Glo/Jamaican tourism advertisement complete with otiose cameos from Patoranking et al and acting performances on a scale of bad to IK Ogbonna from everyone in the film except Funke Akindele.
What a wow.
And yet, for all this bad belle (as he surely must call it), the movie is on track to become the highest-grossing Nigerian film of 2016 (The Wedding Party comes out in November, which means its numbers will go into 2017 as Fifty did) – making N80 million in its first ten days.
To put that in perspective, Omoni Oboli’s was the previous highest-rated, and it only made N65 million (a huge number in Nollywood) at the end of its entire run.
The critics live in one world. And the movie-going audience clearly live in another.
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