It did not come to many as a surprise when the jury of the just-held AMVCA decided to look over Funke Akindele’s A Tribe Called Judah and handed over the Best Movie and other awards to another film, Breath of Life.
When T4T and others, after seeing Aunty Funke’s latest film pronounced it as an attempt by the actress and producer to con her fans artistically, they were called names such as ‘ethnic bigots’ who do not like the tribe the producer hailed from.
It was not a surprise that A Tribe Called Judah became the highest-grossing Nigeria film, a feat that attracted a long commendation message from the presidency; people will always eat a meal not because it was delicious in most cases but sometimes in sympathy or solidarity with the cook.
That was what happened in Funke Akindele’s case because A Tribe Called Judah should go down as one of her most trashy piece of artwork. From the ill-thought script to its delivery, the movie just passed literally as another low-grade Nollywood film.
How on earth did Funke want us to swallow the fact that in 2024, it is okay for five children of a single mother to plan a heist of thousands of dollars belonging to the boss of one of them and the justification for that is that they wanted to pay the medical bills of their mother? And the robbery went south, one of them died, some of the rival armed gang members also died, and the remaining children escaped police arrest with their mother with the police declaring them wanted. End of story!
The person who wrote the kindergarten script should also be asked some questions like why revealing so much ahead of the robbery that made the viewer to already know what to expect. Who thought his or her script writing omitted the act of suspense? Funke on her part needs to be asked why several years after her Jenifa character, she still has not deemed it fit to drop that garb.
Does it mean she is perpetually fixed in the world of Jenifa that she can’t play another character or do scriptwriters now write Jenifa in her knowing that is the only character she can play so well? And what makes aunty Funke think so many people are not tired already with this somewhat repetitive Jenifa character?
T4T did not talk about the scene where the men sent by owner of the money were killed by acid in broad daylight. You just threw acid at heavily armed men and they melted like jelly abi? Even Nollywood films made in Onitsha in the early 2000s will not do that.
