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.
