By Mava John Joshua
The movie begins with a flashback of little Nneka (Idia Aisien) celebrating her birthday with storytelling by her mother while her father is bringing her cake.
Before Nneka can even blow out her candles, a group of people that aren’t shown onscreen attack their home. Nneka’s parents seemingly know who the attackers are and help her escape through a back door. But she doesn’t run away immediately, she stays back to watch the attackers murder her parents with a sword.
Back to the present, Nneka is all grown up, very beautiful but very broke, living in a tiny apartment where she owes the landlord rent arrears and the landlord having a sexual attraction, though she did not bulge. She also works as a waitress at a restaurant and she is seen as a terrible employee.
The only good thing Nneka has going for her is her friendship with her co worker named Ada (Bimbo Ademoye) and her short flirty sessions with one of the restaurant’s recurring patrons named Tony (Kenneth Okolie).
Nneka is consistently consumed with nightmares about her parent’s murder. While experiencing such traumas at her work place that led to Nneka messing up one of the customers with water, this led to her sack from work. Meanwhile, on her way home, the path to her abode requires her going through the beach side, she heard her name being called. She responded to the call, from here the movie takes its twists and turns.
Directed by Bryan Dike and Tosin Igho and Produced by Chris Odeh, one begins to wonder what connections has this movie with the flick written and produced then in 1994 by Zeb Ejiro where the movie was tending towards Nneka’s obsession to have relationships with wealthy men and at the end destroy such families until she met her waterloo.
With the beginning of the movie having almost no details and the writer never bothered to explain, one was curious it was a sequel to Zeb Ejiro’s initial movie NNEKA THE PRETTY SERPENT produced in the early 90s but we don’t see any synergy or correlations.
To be a bit blunt, this NNEKA THE PRETTY SERPENT was not really worth the time. The problem isn’t the quality of production or the details, it’s the actual essence of the movie. The 2020 remake of the classic Nollywood movie “Nneka the Pretty Serpent” isn’t necessarily a remake with the same storyline nor is it a natural continuation but instead it is a tie between a revenge story and a self-discovery story.
The first major problem with this movie would have to be with the lead actor, Idia Aisien who plays Nneka. Nneka is supposed to be a character that is fluent in Igbo, however, Idia’s grasp of the language is surprisingly worse than her Yoruba co-actress (Bimbo Ademoye). But if the struggle ended with the inability to speak a language that would be one thing. The other thing is actual performance. Idia never really gets to a point where you are convinced that she is the character. She is constantly ‘becoming’ or ‘attempting to be’ the character.
