Premium Pictures Studios present Sonia Uche (Simisola), Timini Egbuson (Jameel), Chisom Agoawuike (Jessica), Thelma Nwosu (Betty, Jessica’s Mum), Ogbu Johnson (Richmond), Gift Igah (Ella). Story, Sonia Uche; Screenplay, Nnodiagu Linda; Director of Photography, Emaka Ezemonye; Producer/Executive Producer, Sonia Uche; Director, Great-Val Edochie. © 2025
In my reviews, I often mention my preference for one-word titles. One-word titles pique my curiosity, prompting me to seek out more information about the content behind the title. It doesn’t say much and mostly anything, unlike the four-word wordy titles: “My Real Father Is Our Old Gateman.” I’m not condemning all wordy titles. Half of a Yellow Sun, for instance. Besides…Yellow Sun, is an excellent title, measured and topical. Not at the rate at which Nollywood sprout mushroom titles like out of a Tropical Garden. Titles like Played put the mind, your mind, my mind, to the curious test of cudgeling your brain as who might get played and over what: love, business or money? I must let you in on a secret, a character named Jameel (Timini Egbuson) gets played here.
It is not the life he pulled in Breaded Life (2021) where he acted as the rich and spoilt brat that was taught the lessons of responsible life and later turns hundred and eighty degrees into a positive character (two dimensional). Here, the table turns. He is playing a low life character, like a maggot, with his handsome face, (beautiful) as Betty (Thelma Nwosu), the mother of his near victim can comment at length, out to feed on rich, ignorant women. Five minutes of screen time, he scams a plum-looking rich young girl out of five million and disappears into thin air.
He then runs into Jessica (Chisom Agoawuike), a young inheritor of a business conglomerate, and assumes her easy prey. Of course, she is, until her mother, Betty comes into play. From then on, our Jameel is threading like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), a Tennessee Williams masterpiece on playing nice to get to an inheritance of a lover. Jameel, a habitual scammer, he is, and thinking he has got Jessica all in the bag starts investing in the rogue venture of an affair for her; buys her about one point five million Naira engagement ring. Then his real country wife from Benin, Simisola (Sonia Uche) comes looking for him. Our man gets on the hot tin roof. He needs to balance his wife’s presence while Jessica visits. He and his host, Richmond (Ogbu Johnson), manage the household crisis amusingly. Jessica, as innocent as rich girls come, ignorant of the characters of the men on the outside, fits the character.
But between Jameel and Betty it is all Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), the notorious literary novella piece by Robert Louis Stevenson, of one character trying to outsmart the other, by playing mind game. Jessica’s head over heels for this handsome young man; engineer, he claims to be, and a father died in an accident and mother died recently of covid. Poor Jessica’s heart melts to pieces. Jessica’s mother Betty’s heart didn’t melt to pieces. She had fought such fights before: She had fought live lions, barracudas of all creeds; all the man-eating devils on the side of her dead husband’s families who were fighting her for the Jamison properties. She has vanquished on all the fronts and survived. Jameel is a Toy-boy, a small potato who wants to get into her daughter’s undies and steal away her fortune.
I admire the subtle clever conversation between Jameel in his tank T-shirt, like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and Betty having a tit-a-tete:
Betty, “I hardly get any sleep these days…but I have my daughter, and I’ve had a good life…I also wish for my daughter to have good life.”
“You know mum, it may seem sudden, but I love your daughter, and I want to spend the rest of my life with her.”
“Hmm. (she heaves, hypocritically). Well, Jessica is a wife material, of any man’s dream. She’s intelligent, smart, creative, rich and educated, beautiful….”
“Beautiful…,” he intercepts. “Agreed. Her beauty, her intelligence, that’s what draws me more to her.”
“Yes, but not the types that wants their mother dead, even before they are dead.” still hypocritical.
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“How did you say your mother died?”
“Of Covid.”
After he leaves the scene and knows Jameel is lying.
“My goodness, this boy is a liar.”
Either of the two (Jameel/Betty) play Jekyll and Hyde. Betty is ahead of Jameel in this mind game. She never bought into the lies and façade, Jameel tells her, so she launched a probe into who really Jameel is and soon found the truth. Betty starts playing the fool, with Jameel never the least suspecting. He anticipates with eyes focused like laser on the billion Naira windfall and retires.
Sonia Uche is a trailblazing talent in the movie business. At her age, and having such an eloquent dialogue, and masterful skill in spinning out stories like Homer, or Gcina Mhlophe that female South African author, playwright and performer, or the Mandinka Groits. Coming close to home, Uche, not Jombo–herself a genius in her own right in performing art–could be gradually surpassing Omoni oboli–the current trailblazing female in the Nollywood country. In record time since the Rivals (2007), through The Figurine (2009), thru Being Mrs. Elliot (2014)–themost intensive of her projects in makeups–and thru Imported Wives (2025), Oboli has garnered twenty-six movies as a producer and directed twelve. Uche is grossing at a lightning speed; forty movies, to boot already.
Uche must be gradually following in her footsteps, like a junior, following the master Oboli, to the hall of fame. Most of Uche’s work have plot twists I admire. For instance, the third rail in Played: Betty outwitting Jameel. Betty instead outwitted Jameel while playing this game of chess with one another. Betty wishes for Jessica to have a child, preferably a son, with Jameel and subsequently remove and dismisses him as nobody, because Jameel is a fraud. Yet a daughter who wouldn’t accept semen, or surrogate over Jameel. Only a masterful dialogue could save this melodrama. And the subplot involving Richmond and Simisola which undermined Jameel and later lost everything: money and the love of the native girl. Jameel lost it all.
A challenging aspect of melodrama is how the script achieves a harmonious resolution. In Played, Jameel loses it all: no money, no Jessica, and Richmond, through honesty, wins over Simisola, and Jameel ends up being driven from the house he lied he owned. Jessica gives Simisola the engagement ring valued at about one and a half million Naira, which Jameel bought to impress her with. And Jameel becomes a hunted man by the police. In most of her movies, Uche plays the underdog. In Amaka (2023), some Hausa natives award her a pouch of jewelry, which she keeps at the end of the movie. Now this!