The Players In 'The Game'.

Last night, I decided to relax by watching a new release on the Ghanaian movie market. Title - The Game. Its director Frank Raja Arase, taking lessons from movies such as Sin City, combines two different stories into one 'interesting' movie.

‘The Game’ tells a complex story of, love, affection, greed, betrayal, deceit, corruption, ambition, revenge and complete malice. Before I give my opinion on this movie, let's break the story into two parts, shall we?

Story One: This tells a tale of two brothers, Teddy (Majid Michel) and Bill (Johannes Maier) whose deceased father leaves behind a lot of money and a huge business empire for them to share. However as greed and betrayal sets in, Teddy, a master schemer, plans to have everything for himself. Teddy decides to take the life of his brother. After a failed assassination attempt, he decides to get married to Shenel (Yvonne Nelson) to push his diabolical plans through. Unbeknownst to Teddy, he isn't the only one with plans.

Story Two introduces us to Brandy (Yvonne Okoro), an accomplished liar who lies about being engaged to a big shot businessman, Ronny (John Dumelo) in order to enjoy media attention to boost her modeling agency. And after a series of interesting events, a lie eventually becomes the truth.

After watching the movie with my brother, these were the comments and questions that swam through the blood flowing in my complex brain.

First Question: What the hell is wrong with Frank Raja Arase? You would think that with the mistakes he made with Heart of Men, he would pay more attention to the script this time. The characters in Story One kept interchanging millions and thousands in terms of the amount of money involved. At one point is was a hundred thousand dollars and at another, it was a hundred million dollars. The difference is too significant to be overlooked.

If you would recall, in my review of the Heart of Men, Raja made a similar mistake by letting Nadia Buari’s character tell that of John Dumelo that Majid Michel’s character was at Accra-Ghana when, the former characters were only at the Northern Region and not another country.Raja should remember that, we those watching these movies are intellectuals and not daft beings. Or, am I being unduly harsh?

I heard that Raja was boasting about the movie being the best thing that Ghanaians had ever seen in the movie industry. (Scoffing) I beg... Someone should tell the guy to zip it and thank God that there aren't paid critics in Ghana, else he would be fried for breakfast!

It is true that this movie was a good attempt considering what we've seen over the years. However, in an attempt to create a complex story (especially Story One), Raja ends up taking us through a convoluted plot that makes watching the movie a chore instead of a fun-filled activity.

Oh, and did I forget to say that the concept of gamblers being introduced at certain points was a highly unnecessary and meaningless digression. The fact that the movie's title is The Game doesn't mean that we needed to see gamblers playing cards at the worst casino setting I've ever seen in my life. C'mon!  Were those characters really necessary?

I don't even want to talk about some of the new people casted in this movie; some were talking like babies whilst others sounded like they were kindergaten students at a poetry recital. Imagine.....

As you've probably surmised, I was't wowed by this one (I wasn't wowed by Sin City either). The elements of suspense are highly lauded but then again, how can you love one part of a movie and hate the other? I paid GH¢5 to enjoy a whole movie and not half of it (else I would have paid GH¢2.50, wouldn't I?).

So, if you've seen this movie, please let me know what your thoughts are on this one.

P.S I just found that scenes from this movie are too similar for comfort to an Indian movie titled "Race". Check out this link and see for yourself  http://www.apunkachoice.com/titles/rac/race/mid_896/preview/ .

And to think Frank Raja was even bragging when his material was probably "borrowed" from what, a Hindi movie? Geez! It gets better or should I say, worse.... every minute.