Jordan Peele, who won a well-deserved writing Oscar for his breakthrough hit — 2018’s Get Out — has succumbed to the M. Night Shyamalan curse.
Each new film tries harder, yet achieves less.
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| Having learned enough to realize that they're dealing with something quite nasty, our heroes — from left, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya), Emerald (Keke Palmer) and Angel (Brandon Perea) can't imagine what to do next. |
Nope — a terrible title, just in passing — obviously began life as a 10-word elevator pitch (which I cannot speculate upon, due to spoilers). It might have turned into a decently chilling 20-minute short, but as a 135-minute vanity flop, the result is a dull, interminable slog.
Ten minutes into this bomb, it’s blindingly obvious that we’re dealing with a world-class stinker. And it doesn’t get any better. Worse, in fact.
Following two brief prologues — I’ll dial back to those in a moment — we meet siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer), who are struggling to maintain the legacy of their father’s specialty horse ranch, which provides animals for Hollywood shoots, theme parks and the like. Their operation, located in the isolated Agua Dulce desert in northern Los Angeles County, hangs by a thread.
OJ is expressionless and taciturn to the point of somnambulance, throughout this entire story; he makes Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” — back in that actor’s 1960s spaghetti western days — look and sound Shakespearean. It takes genuine talent to guide an actor with Kaluuya’s significant chops into such a relentlessly dull and lackluster performance, but Peele — who wrote, directed and produced this turkey — somehow managed.
Emerald, in contrast, is shrill, profane, insolent, mean-spirited and — in short — absolutely intolerable. Palmer behaves as if she’s revved up on cocaine the entire time; her performance is unrestrained, unintelligible and unlikable. We loathe her character on sight, and Palmer isn’t helped by the stream-of-consciousness babble that Peele apparently believes passes for dialogue.
Rarely have two movie characters so effectively — and so quickly — turned an audience off. The very thought of spending more than two hours with them is unbearable.
First, though, we endure the travesty of prologue No. 1, as a TV family sitcom shoot goes awry when its star — a chimpanzee — suddenly attacks his human co-stars in a gory swath of blood-laden rage.
The notion that any filmmaker would be insensitive enough to mount such a tasteless spectacle — in our more enlightened, post-Jane Goodall era — is utterly appalling. It’s also an indication of unrestrained arrogance on Peele’s part, particularly since it adds nothing to his film.
Prologue No. 2 is more interesting, as it establishes the dynamic between OJ and his father, Otis (Keith David), the former doing his best to honor what the latter worked so hard to build, despite a dwindling call for their animals. Otis doesn’t last long; he’s abruptly killed during what seems to be an invisible hailstorm.
So, moving forward:
OJ and Emerald begin to notice odd atmospheric phenomena in the sky above their spread. Winds whip up unexpectedly, accompanied by a loss of all manner of power: electricity, internal combustion engines, even cell phones. The horses always are the first to notice; they get nervous and frightened, and one even bolts into the desert.
Then, one evening, OJ spots something swooshing through the night sky.
Prodded by Emerald, who smells dollar signs, they head to the local Fry’s and pick up all manner of cameras and other surveillance gear. (OJ lamented, a bit earlier, that they’re “flat broke,” and yet somehow they pay for all this stuff. Peele also isn’t too good about continuity.)
Their purchases attract the attention of clerk/tech specialist Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), a UFO “true believer” who recognizes what they’re up to, and offers to help. Although OJ and Emerald initially decline, subsequent events quickly turn them into a Scooby gang of three.
Perea’s performance is overly excitable, but at least he’s entertaining. Angel’s geeky, wild-eyed enthusiasm is a breath of fresh air, compared to his two companions.
The Haywoods share their valley with a faux ghost town and family-friendly Western tourist attraction run by Ricky Park (Steven Yeun) and his wife, Amber (Wrenn Schmidt). As a former child star, Ricky survived the Prologue No. 1 massacre; the experience has made him … rather weird.
Yeun seems constantly dazed and confused, as if Ricky is two sentences behind in any given conversation. As with Kaluuya’s OJ and Palmer’s Emerald, Ricky doesn’t look or sound like anything remotely resembling an actual human being.
But he’s mere preamble to Michael Wincott’s très bizarre performance as Antlers Holst, a veteran cinematographer who enters this story’s third act, and who promises to get Emerald her “money shot.” Perhaps Peele intends to make fun of filmmakers who take themselves too seriously (like himself?); regardless, Holst babbles a constant stream of pseudo-cryptic nonsense, elevating this mess into even higher levels of butt-numbing absurdity.
Peele obviously believes that his excruciatingly s-l-o-w first two acts build to an exciting finale, but it’s so random, daft and unbelievable that we cannot possibly become emotionally involved.
This is a classic example of the so-called “idiot plot,” which lurches forward — from one deranged moment to the next — only because each and every character behaves like an idiot at all times.
Matters aren’t helped by the occasional slow, mysteriously hallucinogenic corridor (?) shots; or the half dozen pointless, white-text-on-black-background intertitle cards that abruptly interrupt the minimal dramatic intensity Peele is able to generate.
And this so-called scary film’s biggest sin?
It isn’t the slightest bit scary.
Long before Harlan Ellison became a celebrated and award-winning sci-fi/fantasy author, in 1953, at the age of 19, he published a short story called “Mealtime” in the Ohio State Sundial. Its one-sentence joke punch line is essentially the same as Peele’s preposterous denouement here — accidental? deliberate? — but Ellison’s 10-page story, despite its primitive prose, is far more entertaining.
Given his apparent career trajectory, the notion of Peele’s next film should worry us.
Quite a lot.
I confess I expected you to be wrong about this one, but nope! I saw it this afternoon, and it is a boring, banal beast with obvious symbolism sitting in for a logical plot.
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