Everybody Loves Jenifa (2024)

This could be the worst of the 387 films I've seen in a cinema this year, yet it was certainly popular with the audience who frequently laughed out loud at the antics of "Jenifa" (Funke Akindele). Like just about everyone in their township, she runs some sort of foundation for the underprivileged, so when there is a newcomer to their compound of rather grand looking houses, and he has a legitimate NGO with which she can associate, she determines to befriend him. Thing is, "Lobster" (Stan Nze) has a big secret to keep that when his wife "Olivia" (Nancy Isime) finds out, leads to a confrontation witnessed by our eponymous nosey neighbour and resulting in a sort of Nigerian equivalent of a comedy-fatwa being put on her head. Meantime, she is lured to a beachside resort in Ghana where she is ostensibly to work on a wedding, but that proves to be fairly complicated too as her wooing boyfriend "Shege" (Falz) manages to get everyone embroiled in some shenanigans with the drug dealing "Bebe" (Jackie Appiah). All of this mess is presented in the style of a very cheaply produced soap opera, it's episodes sloppily stitched together with an annoyingly haphazard amount of dialogue that ends up just adding to the messiness of the whole thing. There's no doubt that Akindele has a sort of charm to her, but she's trying to cover way too many bases here and the scenarios are way more contrived than they are funny. It's perhaps rescued, on occasion, by the legal eagle that is "Madame Bassey" (Bosola Aiyeola) who reminded me a lot of "Hetty" from "NCIS: Los Angeles" - only more menacing, but otherwise I think I'd have to take issue with the title. I didn't love Jenifa, sorry.