Sometimes, when you come up with an idea for a film, it is better not to pursue it. It would have been better if the concept or various concepts mentioned in the film could have been nipped in the bud. Unfortunately, nobody was sensible to do so with “Disconnect: The Wedding Planner.” Directed by David Tosh Gitonga, this Kenyan Netflix Original is a piece of the puzzle that you wish you had never started solving in the first place. The story of a brattish rich man trying to salvage his business by organizing a wedding for his potential business investor. Will he be able to do this while keeping in mind how careless he is? More on that can be found in the article below.
Spoilers Ahead
Otis And His Misadventures With Money
Otis is a rich guy who received all his money as inheritance from his mother, who was a successful businesswoman herself. Otis is the type of man who jumps from relationship to relationship without committing himself and stringing the woman along with him. He believes in casual relationships and never in long-term commitments. The movie begins with his girlfriend breaking up with him, and asking him to take this relationship seriously. The breakup hardly affects him, for he jumps to checking out other women around him. Otis also runs a business handed over to him by his mother, but sadly, he is going through rough times and is seeking an active investment from an old friend. Over a phone call with Dele, a rich Nigerian businessman, Otis is trying to convince him to invest in his business. Otis, though, overhears Dele’s fiancée arguing with her wedding planner regarding their upcoming wedding plans. Otis, in the hope of getting Dele on his side, offers to take care of the wedding planning and management, which will now happen at a beachside resort in Mombasa, Kenya. A destination wedding is what he sells to Dele and Rita. Rita is keen on giving him the job, but Dele is not convinced. Otis manages to convince Rita, through which Dele gets convinced of the same. Otis, at this point, is willing to do anything to make sure Dele invests in his venture. Though it is highly immature of him to propose planning an entire wedding when he has no experience in doing so. Otis comes across a man who skates by in life on his charm, leaving the finer details to be sorted out later down the line. Otis approaches a wedding planner to help him manage the whole wedding. He decides to pay her half the amount for the work she is about to start for the wedding. The other half of the amount will be paid halfway through. Otis feels this part of the show is sorted, and he will have to take care of the rest.
Otis, on the other hand, is in a relationship with TK, a fiercely independent woman. He organizes a birthday party for her, but she gets upset at him because many of his ex-girlfriends show up at the party. She breaks up with him immediately, to his dismay. They remain friends after that, and TK comes to his rescue whenever he is in trouble. TK is the kind of woman who would help anyone close to her in a heartbeat. Even though things between her and Otis don’t work out, she makes it a point to be his friend. Otis also happens to have a child with one of his ex-girlfriends. Otis is prim and proper with his schedule to meet his daughter and always makes time for her. Otis is a good father but not a good man to be in a relationship with, as behind all his cool dude façade, he fears being emotionally close to anyone for fear of hurting them or getting hurt himself.
Richard, Celine, And Other Friends
Richard and Celine are Otis and TK’s friends who have been with each other for four years but are going through a rough patch relationship-wise. Richard and Celine are trying to figure out what is going wrong because they are the only people in their friend circle who have had a long-lasting relationship. They are in that part of the relationship where they argue a lot, and they do not seem to be able to find a solution to their issue. To salvage their relationship, they also try relationship counseling, which goes south quickly. Richard is confused about what Celine wants, and Celine is not happy with where her relationship is heading, making her confused about if she should break up with him or not. TK and Celine have been friends for very long, and they also live with another friend of theirs, Judy. Judy, just like Celine, is an independent woman in a relationship. She, unfortunately, catches her boyfriend with her father’s secretary and concludes that he is cheating on her. She also calls off her relationship. Judy is the most sensitive type of person in the group because she was deeply affected by her boyfriend’s infidelity.
Is Otis Able To Plan The Yoruba Wedding After All? Do Richard And Celine Sort Out Their Relationship Issues?
Otis’s plan to organize a grand Yoruba wedding at a beach resort in Mombasa comes crashing down when his assistant lets him know that the wedding planner, to whom he had given the money is unreachable. Otis heads to her office to find it empty, and no one can help him. Realizing that he has been scammed, Otis goes into crisis-aversion mode instead of filing a police complaint. Filing a police complaint would mean Dele and Rita would know of this disaster, and they would pull out of the agreement they made with Otis. Otis now wonders how to solve this mega problem standing in front of him. All he can think of is asking his friends for help to make this wedding a success, which will work in favor of Otis in the long run. He asks TK, Judy, Richard, Celine, Khalid (Otis’s business partner), and his assistant to help sort out the mess that has happened because of him. His friends know him and arrive at the resort to get an idea of the gravity of the situation and to see what could be salvaged and what was beyond their powers to do any damage control. Otis is grateful for his friends, which includes his ex-girlfriend, who landed to help him the minute he put forward his problems. All of them did have some issues, but at the end of the day, they made a conscious choice to help Otis.
Richard and Celine’s relationship seems like it cannot be salvaged by a beach resort wedding. Richard is confused and Celine, on the other hand, is wondering if she made a mistake by spending four years with the same man. Richard and Celine, during the wedding preparation, have a falling out, which makes Richard want to be on his own for a while, but he is joined by Judy for a walk. As both are at a vulnerable stage at that point, they end up spending a night together. Judy is wracked with guilt, while Richard has no strength to tell Celine about the mistake he’s made. Judy comes out of Richard’s room and is witnessed by TK, who is visibly disturbed by what she sees.
As the wedding day approaches, the bride, the groom, and their families land at the resort only to find Otis’s arrangements not up to the mark and inadequate. They wanted a Yoruba wedding, and Otis is delivering something quite different, which is unacceptable to both Dele and Rita. Both are angry and have a mini meltdown because they wanted a perfect wedding, something done to their taste and not Otis’s taste. The irony of Otis being the wedding planner here is that Otis has never been in a long-term committed relationship to understand the aesthetics any committed couple would want for their wedding. This proves Otis is a money-minded person who doesn’t understand the nuances of a couple about to wed and the kinds of motifs required to make their day special.
Otis is attracted to one of the guests at the resort, but as he starts getting intimate with her, he keeps remembering TK. This proves that TK will always be the love of his life, and he is just too scared to admit his love for her. The wedding preparations are finally back on track thanks to TK, Khalid, and Otis’s assistant, who make sure to give Dele and Rita what they want. In the background of all of this, Richard hopes to reveal the truth of his and Judy’s one-night stand incident. Out of sheer panic, Richard ends up asking Celine to marry him. Celine accepts his proposal and confesses that she realizes she has been tough to be around. She hopes this engagement leading up to their wedding will make things smoother for them. The proposal happens on the same day as the wedding, and Richard conveys the news to Otis and Khalid. They wind up informing Richard that Celine had slept with her ex-boyfriend four years ago while being with Richard. This breaks Richard’s heart, and he decides to confront Celine. Richard is mad about the fact that he has been wracked with guilt, but Celine lived with this incident for four years and never managed to let him know about it. They break up immediately because Richard is sure of the fact that Celine keeps comparing him to her ex-boyfriend, which is unfair. TK gets involved in letting everyone know that Judy and Richard had a fling, and he cannot dump all the guilt on Celine. This closes the door on Celine and Richard for good.
The wedding goes as planned, is beautiful, and is successful, but a lot of truths also come out. Khalid takes Dele away from Otis and convinces him that investing with Otis would be the biggest mistake he could make. Dele changes his mind and decides to enter a venture with Khalid instead. Otis comes to know of something brewing between Khalid and Dele and confronts the groom. Dele reveals that he cannot spend his money on Otis because Otis’s business is sinking like a ship, and he needs to do something quick to revive it. Otis is devastated, and TK comes to his rescue. She confronts him about what he wants from life, and clearly, he cannot spend all of it being unstable personally and professionally. She also reveals that the reason she comes by to help him is that deep down, she still loves him, but he doesn’t have the guts to admit his love for her. Otis is an emotionally unavailable man who is trying to be a different person for TK, but his old self takes over, which makes him back off from the idea of being with TK forever.
The wedding is over, and Richard and Celine get back together because they realize their love for each other is stronger than their issues, and they are ready to work on it. Judy pushes Otis to pursue what he loves, which is TK. Otis clears up his mess and asks Khalid to help him with an interview. Khalid sees a new man in Otis and decides to offer him a job at his company. Otis also approaches TK to find out what she thinks of the idea of being with him forever. TK is afraid too, but her love for him overcomes all the fear and inhibitions, and they declare their love for each other. TK and Otis are made for each other because they understand what they want, their trigger points, and their good and bad moods. There is no other person they would want to spend their life with. At the end of “Disconnect: The Wedding Planner,” Richard and Celine are expecting their first child now that it’s been a few months since their reconciliation, and Khalid and Judy are dating and expecting a child together as well. All ends well for all of them, as they find happiness on their own.
Final Thoughts
“Disconnect: The Wedding Planner” is a good attempt to bring the African communities to the forefront, especially on a platform like Netflix, but all the actors in this film deserved a better film to showcase their talents. This film is the Kenyan equivalent of the Hindi film “Shaandar,” where the director and the writer have no clue about what they want to portray or showcase to the audience. There is no screenplay as such, but there are badly disjointed scenes of actors doing what they are told. Too many subplots began but didn’t have any closure. The screenplay and story are nonexistent in “Disconnect: The Wedding Planner,” for the director kept adding scenes, one after the other, without any structure. As a viewer, after just half an hour into the film, I was in awe of the costumes, makeup, and accessories worn by the women in the movie; the rest of the important factors, such as acting, direction, editing, and cinematography, were plain tawdry. It was upsetting to watch the talent of the men and women in the movie being wasted because of bad-quality writing. “Disconnect: The Wedding Planner” could have been so much better if the screenplay had a basic structure. Not at all recommended.
“Disconnect: The Wedding Planner” is a Kenyan Netflix Original film streaming on the platform with subtitles.
