Title: THE CEO  (1 – 3)

Starring:  Nadia Buari, Desmond Elliott, Roselyn Ngissah, Ekow Blankson

Synopsis:

A “no nonsense” CEO becomes the victim of revenge when she fires two loyal employees.

Review:

The story commences at the company’s anniversary party. We meet the key employees of the company including Gloria, the CEO. It’s all about Gloria (Selassie Ibrahim) and her assistant, Farida, is practically her shadow.

Farida (Nadia Buari) had to be available to Gloria at all times and was under strict orders to never take her phone off. Farida’s relationship with her boyfriend suffered because of the constant intrusive phone calls from Gloria after work hours. Even Gloria’s marriage became stale due to her never-ending work schedule.

The core of the story is about the firing of two male employees. The men were left feeling angry and jerked after devoting years of their lives to the company. These disgruntled employees sought revenge and kidnapped Gloria’s daughter and demanded a ransom. When the police got involved and botched the exchange, Gloria took matters into her own hands in order to retrieve her daughter.

Let’s Talk. This is a very slow moving story and quite frankly, boring. It focused more on the problematic relationships between Farida and her boyfriend and Gloria and her movie director husband.

The title “The CEO” leads one to believe that it’s a fast paced office drama but it was anything but. Some scenes were completely unnecessary and others dragged on forever. Furthermore, there was a rift between Gloria’s housemaids that was basically pointless. Why do we need to see the disagreements between housemaids in a movie called “The CEO?” 

There was a point in the movie when someone had to sketch a picture of the kidnapper based on the description given by a woman. How convenient that the drawing looked exactly like the abductor. Sigh…

There’s another scene where Gloria was in a meeting with two employees. She barely paid attention and continued writing on her pad and responded to her cell phone while she made little to no eye contact with the staff. This was actually rude and had the producers studied the characteristics of high-level personnel they would know that eye contact is important even when dealing with subordinates. Gloria was described as one of the most renowned CEO’s in the country. Puhleeze. I think not.

In terms of performances, I thought Nadia, Roselyn, and Ekow Blankson were good. Unfortunately, even they couldn’t save this lackluster, disappointing, movie. At the end of the day, “The CEO” appeared to be just an advertisement for Smartty’s Productions and Smartty’s Boutique. Pathetic. EJECT

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