In the new Funke Akindele picture, the actress-producer brings back Jenifa, the character on whose back billions of naira have been made obliquely. Until ELJ, no single instalment of the Jenifa franchise had reached that figure but it was the popularity of the character and its maker that gave Nollywood Omo Ghetto, Battle On Buka Street, and Tribe of Judah, all of which are among the most lucrative projects anyone in Nollywood has ever made.
And yet, it must be said that, those figures speak more to the size of Akindele’s nose for business and the reach of her fame. None of it is a commentary on the quality of the film themselves.
That said, the very first Jenifa movie, from 2008, was a decent comedy. Which makes it a pity that the new one, Everybody Loves Jenifa, doesn’t take its cue from that film; instead, it is an extension of the uneven Jenifa’s Diary, a TV series you can find on Akindele’s YouTube page. In keeping with the tone of the series, the new film is noisy, shabbily made, occasionally funny, and seems to exist primarily because it WILL make money. You can’t knock the hustle but you can knock the artlessness.
Once again, Akindele plays Jenifa, the Bad English Queen of Yorubaland. She’s being courted by Shege (a highly motivated Falz reprising his role in the franchise) whose overtures she doesn’t quite want. He wants to marry her; she doesn’t quite think he’s good enough.
For a certain kind of filmmaker this setup might lead to a probe of hypergamy or something that connects quality of education and English to love and class in Nigeria but Akindele as producer or director, as she is here, isn’t that filmmaker. If there is a perceptible philosophy to her work it is either accidental or the philosophy of easy laughs. Since becoming one of her industry’s most prominent women, Akindele has shoehorned certain societal concerns into her films, but she has never given anyone the sense that artfully-engineered activism is a primary concern of hers, certainly not in the Jenifa series.
Efiko Score: 5/10. Funke Akindele’s latest billion naira-earner feels like a collection of skits suited for YouTube consumption.
In any case, Shege is abroad when the film begins and so is shut out from the action that takes place in and around Jenifa’s neighbourhood, an area receiving the attentions of one Mr Lobster (Stan Nze). Lobster runs an NGO involved in the rehabilitation of misguided youth but Jenifa isn’t very comfortable with him. One day, she sees the man engaged in a quarrel with his wife (Nancy Isime in a super-cameo). It turns violent and sets Jenifa and Lobster on a collision course. Shege will return to the story at some point and, as you can imagine, things will come to a head.
In other words, there will be a lot of smaller stories—skits, actually—that will never quite be resolved satisfactorily. But for fans of Jenifa and her creator, this is a feature. Indeed, that is what the Jenifa series has become: the fount that springs eternal. All Akindele has to do is remind her audience that it exists and it will power the actress’s brand for sometime until it’s time to remind viewers that the character exists.
None of this is really bad. But the overall impression that ELJ passes is that the audience doesn’t deserve more than a story that is literally all over the place: The film takes place across Nigeria and Ghana and over the internet. The commercial imperative is so blatant that a decent amount of time is committed to the advertising of a resort in the smaller West African country.
In storytelling terms, ELJ is a walking-back of the ambition Akindele showed in Tribe Of Judah. But, again, that might not be too bad—if it wasn’t so obvious that the new film belongs to YouTube, an essentially free platform, rather than the cinema where a certain level of seriousness ought to be demanded or placed on filmmakers by themselves.
It was always clear that Akindele will rake in cash from the Everybody Loves Jenifa run. But for those who go to the cinema and pay a small fortune to see her film, this isn’t great advertisement for Nollywood. Everybody might love Jenifa. One just wishes Jenifa loved everybody back enough to make something a lot more worthwhile, something befitting the love they have showered on her creator. She more or less did that with Tribe of Judah. She can do it again.
