Ordinary People, Extraordinary Overreach: Moses Inwang’s Three Hats Couldn’t Hold The Weight

One Man, Three Jobs, One Compromise

There is something admirable about Ordinary People. The film is clearly not afraid to dream big. You can see the intention behind it. However, there is a very specific danger in Nollywood when one person insists on writing, producing and directing the same project, and Ordinary People is a textbook case study in exactly how that danger plays out. Moses Inwang spent six years conceiving this story and three years making it, and he has called it the most star-studded production in Nigerian film and television history. That kind of scale, that kind of ambition, deserved more hands on deck, not fewer. When one person controls the pen, the purse and the lens, something almost always gives, and here it wasn’t subtle. The story wanted to be big, an eight-part thriller set inside Mirage Estate, an upscale community where manicured lawns hide buried secrets, but bigness without distributed authorship tends to buckle under its own weight. Ordinary People buckled. It is one of those films where you keep thinking, “I understand what they were trying to do,” even when the film itself struggles to make you feel what it wants you to feel.

Too Many Doors, Not Enough Hallway

The biggest problem with Ordinary People is that it tries to do too much at once, the central story is built around Tornado, but the film keeps opening doors into the lives, secrets and personal histories of other characters, which I assume is partly what informed the title: ordinary people carrying extraordinary secrets. In theory, that’s an interesting premise; in practice, most of these subplots don’t strengthen the main story so much as exist beside it, arriving to reveal something and then wrapping up with a convenient resolution rather than feeding back into Tornado’s arc. Laguda is meant to be the connective tissue, the one watching everyone, and while his motivation to watch Tornado tracks, it’s never clear why he’s surveilling the rest of the estate’s occupants beyond the convenience of having one figure who can expose everybody’s secrets on cue. The film could have gone deeper into Tornado’s own atrocities and escapades instead of splitting its attention across layers that never earn their keep, because there’s a real difference between a film being layered and a film simply having too much happening in it, and Ordinary People keeps crossing that line. Ironically, in the end, the subplots do more to justify the title than they do to strengthen the plot.

The Writing Couldn’t Carry The Weight

Honestly, this is where Ordinary People really loses me. The story is ambitious, but the writing just doesn’t keep up with it, and a lot of the characters needed more work to feel real. It’s a bit like fighting too many battles at once without enough time for any of them, you rush through each one just to get it over with, without stopping to check if you actually won. The film does try to give the side characters some backstory, and that effort is there, but it plays more like several different stories that could each have been their own film, all squeezed in and rushed, and never really tied back to Tornado in a way that feels earned. You could say the estate itself connects everyone to Tornado, but that’s not really how storytelling works, a subplot needs a clear reason to matter to the main plot, not just shared geography, and that reason is missing here more often than not. The dialogue has the same problem: a lot of it exists just to push the plot forward rather than sound like real people talking, and you can almost feel the writer nudging characters toward the next big moment, which drains the emotional scenes of the impact they should have had. For a story this big, the writing needed to be the strongest part of the whole production, because everything else, the directing, the acting, the visuals, was always going to lean on it. And that foundation just wasn’t solid enough to carry the weight.

Some Performances Remind You What the Film Could Have Been

Thankfully, some actors occasionally pull the film back to life. Sharon Ooja, Uche Montana and Lasisi stood out for me, particularly because they brought personality and believability to moments that the writing sometimes struggled to sell.There is something refreshing about watching an actor make a scene feel more natural than it is written. They remind you that the problem isn’t necessarily the concept or even the cast, there is clearly talent within the film. However, some other actors landed with very flat, unconvincing performances. Their performances had no soul. The technical departments, however, needed considerably more attention. The production design creates a world that is not completely unbelievable, but the period details are often confusing and not fully realised. Then there is the makeup, which misses the mark even more noticeably. The transformation of Ramsey and Adunni into darker-skinned characters is particularly distracting. Ramsey’s transformation, in particular, feels like a visual shortcut rather than a convincing character transformation. You shouldn’t be thinking about the makeup while you’re watching the character. Unfortunately, Ordinary People gives you several reasons to notice it.

Nollywood Can’t Keep Borrowing the Look Without the Infrastructure

This is perhaps the bigger conversation the film accidentally starts. Nollywood has reached a point where filmmakers are increasingly attempting stories that require a much larger technical ecosystem. We look at what our Western counterparts are doing, see the scale, the production design, the period worlds, the visual effects and the elaborate storytelling, and understandably want to attempt our own versions. But sometimes we copy the appearance of those films without having the infrastructure to support the ambition. And when we discover that certain things are difficult to execute, we improvise. Sometimes those improvisations work. Sometimes they make the film feel smaller than the idea deserves. Ordinary People occasionally falls into this trap. There are moments where you can feel the film reaching for something grand, only for the execution to pull it back down. Even the use of AI and certain visual solutions can feel like the industry is experimenting with tools we haven’t completely mastered yet. There is nothing wrong with ambition, but ambition without authenticity, restraint and technical confidence can easily become spectacle that feels funny instead of impressive. An eight-part series like this could have benefited enormously from leaning into a more authentic Nigerian identity in its writing and development rather than trying so hard to make the world feel foreign in its design.

The Attempt Matters, But So Does the Landing

I don’t think Ordinary People should be dismissed simply because it doesn’t completely achieve what it sets out to do. Moses Inwang clearly knew the story he wanted to tell on paper. The problem was translating that vision into visuals, performances, production design and a coherent narrative structure. That is not an easy task, and the attempt itself deserves some encouragement. But Nollywood has also come too far for ambition to become an automatic excuse for execution. There was a time when we could say, “At least they tried.” Today, audiences are asking for more, and rightfully so. If you are going to build a film around a big idea, the idea has to land. If you create multiple layers, those layers have to serve the central story. If you create a period world, the details have to sell the period. If you transform a character, the transformation has to feel real. And if you write dialogue, the people speaking those words have to sound like human beings. Ordinary People has the bones of something interesting, but too often, I found myself seeing the ambition rather than experiencing it. And perhaps that is the film’s greatest lesson: it is not enough to know the film you want to make; you also have to know what it takes to make the audience believe in it.