Mister Johnson is a 1990 American drama film based on the 1939 novel by Irish author Joyce Cary.

He marries Bamu in a Christian marriage ceremony and offers to share his "wealth" and "civilized" life with her, though she continues to behave according to her traditional Nigerian role as a wife instead of like an Englishwoman.

The treasurer, Mister Tring, arrives and identifies anomalies in the cash book, so he fires Johnson and stops work on the road.

Johnson tells locals that there is a prize of five pounds to the group that clears the most bush, to be paid to the chief, and work commences again.

[5] The film was well reviewed, but met with criticism for depicting Africans as servants to colonial Britons.

[4] In a positive review of the film, Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that "Mr. Beresford's film acknowledges the boundless optimism of its leading character even as it watches him paint himself into a corner" and that Johnson "is at his most purely touching in such joyous moments, loyally celebrating English principles even as they bring about his downfall.

"[7] John Simon of the National Review called Mister Johnson a work of genius.

His unfailing optimism, even in the bleakest circumstances, makes him nearly impossible to dislike, no matter what sort of chicanery he's employing or advocating."

"[1] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a rating of B−, writing that "Johnson, the invisible scoundrel, is never quite as innocent as he seems.

Eziashi plays him with such a relentless, singsong inscrutability that by the end of the movie, he veers uncomfortably close to becoming a liberal-humanist Stepin Fetchit.

"[9] Clayton Dillard of Slant Magazine gave the film a rating of 3 1/2 out of four stars, writing, "As Bruce Beresford’s follow-up to Driving Miss Daisy, Mister Johnson is both a departure and a continuation, trekking toward more difficult narrative terrain given the colonial African setting, but united by the director’s continued interest in depicting characters, on all sides of a given conflict, with considered compassion.

"[11] In a negative review of the film, Tom Tunney of Empire wrote that the film "fails abysmally because of the grinning shallowness of Eziashi's portrayal and, secondly and much more crucially, because the role he's been lumbered with is a demeaningly cheerful stereotype of the kind that should have gone out with Uncle Tom's Cabin.