'The Ghost and the Tout Too' Delivers A Cheesy Plot For A Sequel

The second installment in Toyin Abraham's comedy franchise.

Toyin Abraham’s latest film, ‘The Ghost and the Tout Too’, is the staple offering of action and comedy that we have come to expect in Nigerian cinema.

Taking a cue from its prequel ‘The Ghost and the Tout’, we see Isla portrayed by Toyin Abraham reiterates her character as a ghetto bred who can see ghosts. This time, Isla is in tune with her powers, and she tags her best friend Amaka (Mercy Johnson) on her adventure as a psychic. Soon after, her life is thrown into a series of dramas that only she can see and understand.

Directed by fast-rising Nollywood director, Micheal Akinrogunde (AMA Psalmist), the film strives for wild, physical humor and heart-tugging poignancy but achieves neither, occupying an uncomfortable middle ground of its own.

The screenplay struggles with setting a plot as substantial as its first part, making it arduous to decipher the producer’s motivation for producing a sequel of this particular story.

With a runtime of over one hour thirty minutes, the movie showcases its lead character Amoke (Osas Ighodaro), as complacent but incapable of helping herself. Amoke’s drink is spiked while attending a party; she slides into a coma and has only seven days left to live. With her unsettling spirit seeking a solution, she solicits Isla’s help in solving the mystery behind her attempted murder.

This project would have been a superb narrative to tell, but the character development and backstory are weak and needed more work to really project situations synonymous with being a medium, especially in Isla’s case. A better background work would have made the flick more engaging through the storytelling.

Asides from its cheesy plot, The Ghost and the Tout Too also fails in terms of characterisation. A lot of the characters are misplaced and their dialogues have no correlation to the progression of the film, begging the question: why use such a large cast if they will be rendered inactive? For instance, Patience Ozokwor plays the role of Mama Gee, an area mama in the community where Isla lives, but unfortunately, she has no lines, and her cameo appearance in the project could definitely have been left out.

Toyin Abraham is famous for infusing a lot of celebrities in her film projects; this definitely works for marketing because a lot of these celebrities have the right social

currency to create a blockbuster film. Still, the audience is deprived of an actual storyline, in most cases, because many of these characters are not appropriately utilized to make the motion picture work.

Toyin Abraham's delivery in this film is also a bit over the top. Toyin is an excellent comedy actress, but this particular character has her all over the place, and her delivery seems forced and unreal, making it strenuous for us to root for her character, who appears to be struggling with balancing her life with the real world and afterlife. Her needs were unclear, and the spur to follow her story was watered down as the play drew to its end.