Mike Ezuruonye outdoes himself on this one, stepping away from the Nollywood fine boy stereotype he has been stuck in for many years. It is brave, especially because doing comedy in Nigeria is super dicey. First, people already have a perception of you, and when you go outside that, their expectations go through the roof. But then again, if you excel at this, like Rita Dominic in The Meeting or Funke Akindele in Jenifa, you earn their respect for a long long time. Mike must have realised he had to go hard or continue to wait for the next fine boy role he has handed down to him, so he took the plunge and produced his own movie.


Directed by Charles Uwagbai and co-created by Mike Ezuruonye and Juliet Ochieng, Brother Jekwu is the story of a village champion from South-Eastern Nigeria dissatisfied with his village life. He begs his cousin, Nwakaego (Angela Okorie), to ‘show him how to catch fish rather than give him fish’. She obliges him and takes him to Kenya. He has to go through the unthinkable, which include joining a criminal gang, going missing, becoming a maid and landing in a psych ward just to keep body and soul together. In the end, he returns to Nigeria a different man, but with just the same terrible English he has always had................

The story bears an insane similarity to AY’s A Trip to Jamaica, and in some ways Osuofia in London and Jenifa. In all of them, a ‘bush man’ goes to a different, more enlightened city, bad English, mannerisms and all, to try to find a life for themselves. Just like the character Akpos, Jekwu gets obsessed with some girl way out of his league. He gets involved with a dangerous set of people who are set to take his life. Of course, in both films, the culprits are apprehended, and the protagonists get to keep the girl, even though Jekwu’s is a different one from the one he is obsessed with. In both, they get to chant something (In Akpos’ case, ‘Warri’ and ‘Their Father’, in Jekwu’s, ‘Happy Happy!’ and ‘Sadam and Gonnoreah’). And let’s not forget the famous ‘dream scene’, where both of them see their crushes sashaying out of a body of water towards them in a swimsuit.

Brother Jekwu starts out very funny. It doesn’..............


http://abspad..com.ng/2017/01/movie-review-brother-jekwu.html