Glamour Girls is the latest Nollywood addition to the ever-growing list of Nigerian movies on Netflix. Released on the 24th of June, 2022, this drama was produced by Abimbola Craig, whose impressive portfolio includes hits like Isoken, Sugar Rush, and 2022 AMVCA-nominated short-firm, Fractured. The ex-Ndani Tv Head of production once again worked with director and writer, Bunmi Adesoye after a successful collaboration on 2021 movie, Who Lived at Number 6.

The movie stars Nse Ikpe-Etim, Sharon Ooja, Joselyn Dumas, Toke Makinwa and Segilola Ogidan as women enjoying the glamorous lifestyle of top-rated dalliance escorts with the attendant perks and risks of the highly-rewarding business.

Glamour Girls, an eponym of 1994 star-studded Nollywood film, was projected to retell the modernized story of the hit, but was later rescripted as a new narrative that bothers on a more situational theme and totally different characters. Though it is still spiced with a reprising roles from the class of 1994, with legendary actors featuring in their 1994 characters; Ejike Asiegbu yet playing the powerful business mogul and pimp, while Gloria Anozie-Young and Dolly Nwachukwu got flash-scenes in same roles as highly-connected goddesses of the pandering business.

Movie Summary

The movie begins with an erotic+ scene at a stripclub, where Emma (Sharon Ooja) is entertaining a VIP guest. She is later accused of stealing the client’s ring by his bodyguard, Zeribe (James Gardiner) and was fired after the it was purportedly found on her. Frustrated and burdened with the demands of being her family’s breadwinner, Emma approaches Donna (Nse Ikpe-Etim), an interior designer moonlighting as a procurer to join her elite league of escorts.

Donna debases Emma and her friends for being too cloddish for her highly-tasteful ring. She mocks them with her girlish-boy assistant, “We are scrapping the bottom of the barrel now, are we? Cheap perfumes. Is that hoarse hair?”. Upon their inability to provide academic qualifications, a sort of requirement for this class of escorts, she shouts them out of her office.

Emma’s determination would her walk right back into Donna’s office. She jumps into striping down to her birth-cloth to showcase her ‘hourglass’ qualification, while lasing with an outburst of her frustrations and determination to ‘upgrade’ her life and career at all cost. Donna reconsiders, a makeover follows, and Emma got admitted to the club of escort sophisticates. Her loutish personality yet posed a challenge to her attempt to win clients until it came handy at one of the hook-up parties, when she wins the affinity of Segun (Femi Branch) with her street chatters while Segun watched a football match. Zeribe, now Segun’s bodyguard had introduced them, more like a peace offering for framing Emma for stealing at the stripclub just to get a free pass at smooching her in guise of searching for the missing ring. He soon becomes a recurrent feature in Emma’s new life of affluence.

A more experienced and successful escort in the ring, Louise (Toke Makinwa), had her duplicitous life well-articulated by funding her husband’s residency in the US far away from the actions back home. She gets a call from Aaron (Uzor Arukwe) who had just arrived Nigeria to surprise her and their two daughters and she’s thrown into a vicious web of meeting client’s needs and managing spousal suspicion.

Jemma (Joselyn Dumas) is the prime of all Donna’s escorts. She had retired into a decent life as a supportive spouse of a terminally ill ex-client and caring mother of a teenage son, Ese. She approaches Donna for a loan to offset an urgent medical bill, but Donna seizes the opportunity to lure her back to work on a major order by Chief Nkem, a long-time customer, and major client of the establishment. After much hesitation she joins the party, where she gets picked by Alexander (Lynxxx), a young business associate and launder-chest of the caucus. The ONS quickly flourishes into a relationship that have Alex and Jemma sharing a roof, after taking her husband off life-support.

Trouble soon hit the pack as Jemma murders Alexander after she catches him molesting her son. Donna comes to the rescue, making Alex’s body disappear and unknowingly setting off an inferno in their entire business and lives. The billionaires are now looking for Alex to recover billions of dollars he launders for them. Jemma, a known companion is prime suspect, along with all the escorts and their boss.

With Louise’s own peculiar situation with Aaron finding her out, Emma’s fight with her past owing to the public humiliation by Segun’s daughter, Hellion’s (Segilola Ogidan) death to drug abuse, the pack rebelled against Donna, asking her to give up Jemma.

Donna takes a trip to Beirut to solicit for the intervention of Queenpin Doris (Gloria Anozie-Young) and Queenpin Thelma (Dolly Nwachukwu), who are believed to wade great powers on the assailing billionaires, but with no definite result. Back home, Zeribe works with Emma to get a hacker to decrypt the content of a flash drive Jemma recovered from Alex’s room, believed to contain information of the funds. The enraged and impatient billionaires in company of a barrage of armed men storms the location of the recovery at a time when all the girls had joined Emma and Zeribe. The girls finally heave a relief after handing the flash back to the billionaires.

Analysis of the plot elements

The characters are depicted as being ambitious and careless at the same time, setting them up for a run against the consequences of bad choices in their thriving business.

Hellion’s unbated dive into reckless and excessive frolicking and drugs costs her life. Louise got it altogether but her extra baggage of staying married caused a chain of events that permanently unsettled her life. Emma rose sporadically from Segun’s spoiling until she started undermining his authority over her as a benefactor. In one little moment of truth, she loosely jumps in bed with Segun’s bodyguard while Segun was still in the house.

Donna followed all her own rules to stay floated until she’s faced with the dilemma of smoking out her long-term partner Jemma for the murder of Alex or laundering the secrets away at the risk of incurring the wrath of her biggest client.

The climax was the scene of the girls apprehensively waiting on the hacker to recover the data of the billionaires money. Emma served Zeribe a plate of his own con meal, outplayed his fast finger tricks by surreptitiously returning the real flash drive of interest he had dropped in her pocket to yet again frame her in front of the billionaire and earned some imagined reward. Zeribe became the culprit, when the flash was found on him and was bounding out to a dire fate.

The denouement was not exactly as expected as the movie ended with the escorts more like $5billion richer and back in business.

The sound was too noticeable and formed a great part of the entire movie. Scenes and actions had one music or the other setting them out.

The settings were a lot Western than it was Nigerian. The clubs, the vacations, race car scenes, jets and hanger parties will sort of resonate more with audiences other than Africans.

The characters were not at their very best and a viewer will find it almost impossible to feel the story’s nuances. A striking example would come from most of Sandra Ooja and Toke Makinwa’s scenes, both apart and together. Their acting gave up the sanctity of role-playing with excessive or inadequate interpretation of the script.

Like the scene where Zeribe picked out a supposedly missing ring from her feet (or so); for a bad street girl who’s innocent of a crime, she would have been more enraged and assaulting than expressed. She just sort of turned to Frances (her boss) to argue her innocence with a squeamish look that gave up a guilty feeling than expected anger.

Maybe the flaws hit more on the not so good work of directing than the movie saw with poor acting. Other issues like the inexplicable pass Emma got back into Donna’s supposedly structured business space (on her quest to join the establishment), and how the entire movie moved to and ended on a small dining area over a flash drive that housed information for $30billion illicit funds begs for further review on how editing passed through the table of Bunmi Adesoye without a grin at these disjoints.

Donna and Jemma were in full character, but Aaron was the personality that came off the movie as immersive. The local igbo man lover becomes lovable just watching him do the language-mixed adulation of ‘Lulu’. Then, the pain of a betrayed husband can be felt when he held out a machete after catching Louise in the act at her shop. The tension can be felt when he ordered Louise out of the road, heading to where the lover was hiding. “Oga you go shit your money today, ehn. Aboy”.

Uzor Arukwe gave life to that script with every tone and gesticulation. Unfortunately though, the tone of the moment was not maximized with the scanty declining sound that would fit better for a scene of hasty conversation between two colleagues down the office hallway. The right sound here would have heightened the mixed feeling of tension and comedy.

The overall production quality was not so good. The sound was here and there; volume issues, transitions issues, choice issues. Choice of music not quite fitting in some occasions, like the scene on a yacht where Emma gets her first trip abroad, the music was so low beat. Maybe a song like I’m on top of the world, would have drawn more emotions here.

Generally, sound design was very poor, video editing not so good as well, casting tethered more towards big names than fusible selections. These diminished the quality input of the cinematographer, excellent acting of Nse, Joselyn, Segiola, Uzor, James, Femi, and the great story that would have been a lot more impactful were the theme not lost to an ending that sort of glorified the procuring and escort business.

By the way, Ejike Asiegbu’s overused sporadic laughter that was intended to infer the character of a sugar daddy was a silly blast from the past; old school Nollywood script interpretation that doesn’t fit quite well with the modern personality of a polished billionaire ‘destiny helper’.

Glamour Girls Review

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• Theme
• Screenwriting
• Visual Design
• Cinematography
• Editing
• Sound and Music
• Acting
• Directing