The Griot

The Griot; a movie with a lot of expectations, but…

This is a love story of a beautiful lady and two friends who were in love with her. Olakunle played by Adedimeji Lateef and Sanmi, his close friend were both in love with Tiwatope. It was Olakunle(Adedimeji Lateef) who was first in love with Tiwa. He made the move indirectly by asking his very close friend, Sanmi to be the middle man for him. But Sanmi who was also lusting after the beauty of Tiwa, decided to betray his friend by making an advancement instead of telling Tiwa how much Olakunle loves her.

On realising this, Olakunle(Adedimeji Lateef), decided to break the friendship between him and Sanmi, and also stopped serving him the benefits of narrating different stories to Sanmi, who uses these stories to gather fame and wealth for himself by narrating them at events and to the general public.

The movie had a lot of promises attached to it as a good movie, but, it lacked a lot of technical powers which I believe should have been taken care of by the semi professionals who handled it.

The first thing that knocked me off from this movie is the shaky establishment shots at the beginning of the movie. Shaky establishment shots for a movie that’s supposed to stream on Netflix?

My second observation was the not synched dialogue between the visuals and the audio. This made me concluded that the editor is a semi amateur. On the contrary, I believe he’s also a reputable name in the industry. The editing also had a lot of continuity issues, which I believed should have been fixed in post-production.

Another major observation from this movie is the poor costuming which had some modern day costumes mixed in it. It’s a complete bad idea for a movie that’s supposed to be traditional or maybe epic. In fact, I had a lot of observations listed on my writing note while studying it. It made me felt like, I should stop watching it.

The movie lacked a good direction. Flat characterisations. Over acting of actors. Wrong casting, and lastly, bad costuming were among some of the notorious mistakes that was made by the gang of poor amateurs who should go back to film schools and relearn the topologies of filmmaking. I felt so sorry for the authorities who were in charge of making this story(which I believe is too early for production). Maybe three or four more drafts could have been written again for perfection. I also believe this movie should have been made in native language, instead of English.

Like I said earlier that this movie had a lot of expectations attached to it, but it failed woefully. The movie screened at the prestigious African international film festival which still gives me concerns on how it got selected. Could it be man know man or the Nigerian corrupt system had a role to play? Of course. It also gave a conclusion note on how it passed Netflix Q & C.

I will be giving a 2.5 out of 5stars rating for this movie, it’s not that bad after all. If you will like to see some of my other reviews, you can check my page here. Thank you for reading through.