Review: Nope

After the death of their father (Keith David in a useless cameo), Daniel Kaluuya and his irresponsible sister Keke Palmer take over his ranch and business, providing horses for the film and TV industry. When that hits a snag, Kaluuya sells some of the horses to former child star Steven Yuen who has his own Western theme park. Meanwhile, some weird events have been happening in the skies. Something is up there. What is it? What does it want? Michael Wincott (solid as ever) plays a cinematographer who becomes involved in the mystery.

 

Calling your film “Nope” is just asking to be mocked. Writer-director Jordan Peele came out of the gates strong with “Get Out”, but his second effort “Us” was a muddled and unsatisfying film, and now with this 2022 alien invasion film he’s gone entirely off the rails. A horror-tinged version of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” might sound like fun, but the execution here is murky, unfocused, glacier-paced and dumb. How dumb? The whole idea of wanting Michael Wincott’s filmmaker/cinematographer character to film the UFO is illogical. This thing is so massive that even in a rural area it’s unlikely that people won’t have already seen it. Secondly, even if they haven’t seen it, people will just say the film is faked because it’s been shot by a professional. Daniel Kaluuya mumbles so much of his dialogue I missed a large chunk of it, and he’s sadly playing our main character.

 

There’s one or two tense moments in the back half, but the tone is wildly inconsistent and the film too frequently boring. Peele seems to want the film to be a mixture of Spielberg, Cronenberg, Shyamalan, and his own vibe and the mix just doesn’t gel. The subplot involving cowboy Steven Yuen (dreadfully miscast) and the psycho chimp eventually ties into the main plot, but not in any way that I felt justified slowing the pace down to a lethargic crawl. I think it easily could’ve been excised with minimal revision to the rest of the story necessary. The whole film feels like Peele just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and whatever sticks, sticks. That’s not much at the end of the day.

 

Keke Palmer is hilarious as the irresponsible sister, but this is by far Peele’s worst film to date. It’s ugly, meandering and boring. It did have one heck of a good trailer though, mostly for having not shown much footage from the film itself.

 

Rating: Nope