Seems the filmmakers’ intention was to have an unsatisfying and lazy ending to the subplots of the film.


That is the most appropriate way to describe Mr. & Mrs. 2. It borrows the broadest ideas from the original 2012 film and takes everything up a few notches to its own detriment.

In an attempt to double down and do a lot more in this film than in the original, the filmmakers bit off more than they could chew and produced a disappointing hodgepodge of a film that fails on way too many fronts.

In this film, we follow three couples as they go through one rough patch or the other in their relationships.

First, we have got Kobi and Sharon played by Chidi Mokeme and Rita Dominic respectively.

They are a married couple with two teenage children and their lives seem to be very comfortable; they’ve got a big house with a ton of domestic staff.

Chidi Mokeme and Rita are the lead characters in the sequel

Their relationship starts to strain when Sharon becomes the sole breadwinner as Kobi can no longer provide for his family because his daddy can’t afford to give him an allowance anymore due to the EFCC freezing his assets in relation to a corruption investigation.

So basically, Kobi doesn’t have a job and lives off handouts from his corrupt politician father, and an audience is expected to empathise with him and his situation.

Added to this story, we have KJ, their perfectly normal looking son being a cocaine addict who owes a drug dealer almost a million naira, and we have their daughter, Ivy, who is starting to come to the realisation that she is a lesbian. This doesn’t seem excessive at all.


We also have Kobi’s father, Senator Dede (Akin Lewis) and his new, young wife, Lami (Tana Adelana). Dede is a politician who is trying to cover his tracks for some corrupt practices.

His plan goes sideways and the EFCC freezes all his assets just before he gets married to his second wife, Lami. With his assets frozen, Lami convinces Dede to live on a budget and sell his home to be able to keep their heads above water.

However, this plot point is never mentioned again and Dede and Lami just continue living their lives as if they have no money issues at all.

The final twosome in this film is Timi (Steve ‘Yaw’ Onu) and Zola (Muna Abii), an engaged couple who are in the middle of planning their wedding. Zola is over the moon about the engagement, but Timi seems to not really care about a lot of things. This causes them to have repetitive arguments in every other scene that they are together in.

All these stories are jumbled together with the help of average acting, shoddy camera work and shambolic editing that cuts every scene right before important information is about to be conveyed.

Not enough attention is paid to any of the stories in Mr. & Mrs. 2 for anyone to have a care about what happens to the characters and the film cuts maniacally from one scene to the next without any real purpose or drive just so it can accommodate the overload of story that it is trying (and failing) to cram into its less than two-hour runtime.

It gets so bad that some stories are just straight up forgotten. One example is the Dede/Lami financial trouble story. Another example is Ivy realising she is a lesbian story.

Mr. & Mrs. 2 set up over a couple of scenes that Ivy is gay, but after she reveals her sexual orientation to her mother (who, by the way, thinks she is joking), the issue is never spoken of again and the story abruptly ends.

Was it the filmmakers’ intention to have an unsatisfying and lazy ending to these subplots or were they just so overwhelmed by the balancing act that is this film that they completely forgot to tie the knot on their stories? My guess is, the latter is true.

Mr. & Mrs. 2 is like a man trying to balance a tray on his head filled with half a dozen women balancing trays on their heads filled with 10-feet tall cakes while the man rides a unicycle on a tightrope in the middle of a hurricane. The man is clearly taking on more than he can handle and his balancing act can only lead to one outcome: failure.



CAST

RITA DOMINIC – Sharon

CHIDI MOKEME – Kobi

AKIN LEWIS – Senator Dede

TANA ADELANA – Lami

STEVE “YAW” ONU – Timi

MUNA ABII – Zola



WRITER

CHINWE EGWUAGU – Story

TEN IKE ETIM – Screenplay



DIRECTOR

TECO BENSON

This post first appeared on TNS.