Movie Review: Shatta Wale Delivers but Shattered Lives Disappoints

Everyone seemed to be excited and hyper days leading to the official premiere of this movie. Obviously because of its catchy title and its connection to one of the cast; Charles Nii Armah Mensah Jnr (Shatta Wale).

Having the Dancehall king on the poster alone was all the publicity and hype that this movie needed to have a sold out premiere. Judging from the turnout last night, it’s clear a lot of people were hungry to see how this controversial artist would perform in his first ever appearance in a feature film.

Shattered Lives tells the story of a beautiful lady suffering the same fate as her mother did, finding herself in an abusive relationship with a man who she truly loves and how she reacts to her unfortunate situation.

This movie seemed to be backed by a most often neglected theme of speaking up against domestic violence and abuse in relationships. This is such an interesting and delicate subject matter to make a movie about so we definitely had high expectations for this.

We believe this movie had a very strong message to give but surprisingly it failed to impress fully. The movie starts off with a message about domestic violence and abuse from the cast that in a way prepares your mind to receive something gory or extremely violent. (Well at least that is the way it seemed for us GhMoviefreak). Fortunately the violence was in no way extreme but enough to support the script and intent of this movie. This intense drama did have a simple script that highlights on everyday occurrences in a lot of relationships that we usual don’t see. Although there were too many flashbacks which we didn’t like there was also some well-placed humor that carefully diluted the whole intense nature of this movie.

This Okechukwu Onyeka directed film starred the much loved Majid Michel and the gorgeous Martha Ankomah in lead roles which we believe they both perfectly executed. Both characters had to depict fierce and vulnerable personas at different points in the film and they were both played out well.  Shatta Wale’s role suited him perfectly and you could tell the audience loved seeing him in all of his scenes. Disappointingly the script didn’t make that good use of him as he had only a few scenes but with each scene he appeared in, his dialogue dropped subtle lines or lyrics from some of his hit songs which pleased the audience.

The performance from Dominic Demordzi went well and it was the second time we were seeing him in a feature film (First was The Counselor, Read review here) and we can only hope he gets some more roles to show us more of his talent. Then also there was Bismark Nii Odoi who was his usual hilarious self in his scenes.

The script incorporated a cameo appearance of Ghanaian contemporary hi-life musician Bisa Kdei (Ronald Kwesi Dei) as a close friend to Majid’s character, Tyron and even had scenes from the making of his Brother Brother video to make it more realistic. But it was a bit confusing as to whether he was playing a cameo role or he was cast as for an independent role. The reason for the confusion was because he was referred to as “Clement” in several of the scenes and also as Bisa in other scenes.

We did not like that the story-line had too many flashbacks which made the sequencing of the story seem a bit distorted. And it eventually seemed to have strayed away from its theme of speaking against domestic violence when the victim turned out to become the perpetrator. Everyone likes the idea of vengeance at times but when it goes way overboard it can’t be justified. There were also some questions that needed to be answered to give the entire script a much deeper meaning but were completely overlooked.

Nothing much can be said about the actual production off this movie except that the producers did really take advantage to position their Ghana Airtime brand in the subconscious of the audience any least chance they got.  There were some very good scenes which were ruined by these shameless plugs and you could tell from the reaction of the audience to the dialogues from those scenes that they were not happy about them.

GhMoviefreak rates this movie 6.6/10 because it was entertaining and had a good message, but it had such a terrible anticlimax that seems to have disappointed a lot of the audience. We believe the overall output of this movie could have been better if it had climaxed properly and delivered its strong message which could  eventually have a positive disrupt against domestic violence in relationships.

All the same this movie is still showing in cinemas and and you should go see it if you haven’t.

If you have seen this movie, what do you also think about it? Do well to leave you comments and feedback in the comment section below.

Watch Trailer Below