Actor/writer/director Jordan Peele has shifted his career into an interesting new mode. He stunned everyone with his 2017 directorial debut "Get Out," which received widespread acclaim and garnered several Oscar nominations (Peele won Best Original Screenplay for the film), and followed up with 2019's "Us," a movie with less of an impact than his freshman outing but no less fascinating in its construction. Peele's third feature "Nope" finds him building on his previously-earned goodwill with a movie that boasts a larger scope and grand ambitions, but a much simpler narrative.
For Peele, working in Hollywood has to be a bit of a double-edged sword. "Get Out" was such an unexpected phenomenon that the expectations could have gone either way. The success he was met with out of the gate now gives him a blank check to do the projects he creates in his own way; but on the other hand, everything he does for the rest of his career will be responded to with, "Well, it's no 'Get Out'."
"Nope" certainly has more spectacle than "Get Out" or "Us," but it's not nearly as thematically rich as either film. It's not a fault of the movie by comparison; it's simply a fault of the movie.
Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya (who broke out as the lead in "Get Out") stars as OJ Haywood, who works with his father (Keith David) wrangling horses. One day, something mysterious starts falling from the sky, taking OJ's father's life and leaving OJ and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) to run the family business of wrangling horses for film sets. OJ and Emerald disagree on what should be done with the ranch in the wake of their father's death, but that conversation gets put on hold when OJ spots a saucer zooming through the sky. Did he really just see a UFO?
The viewer should discover how the rest of "Nope" unfolds without spoilers, because Peele's last two films - flaws and all - are meant to be experienced organically, without much prelude. Going on this adventure with Kaluuya and Palmer is a blast because they bring a lived-in chemistry to their brother-sister relationship, and a Peele movie has never looked better, thanks to cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (who was Oscar-nominated for "Dunkirk"). He captures the landscapes with sweeping wide shots, which makes "Nope" an easy movie to get lost in its setting.
At two hours and 11 minutes, "Nope" is Peele's longest movie, which is interesting because it feels like the simplest of his screenplays. He gets lost in some subplots, including one with Steven Yeun's character that doesn't add much to the overall narrative. As tense and propulsive as "Nope" can be, Peele has never felt this unwieldy in telling a story. Even so, it's hard to be upset with a large-scale, original blockbuster that pays homages to drive-in movies of the 1970s. It's a good movie, but perhaps it's time to take some of our bloated expectations off Peele as a filmmaker.
Nope Movie Review By Matthew Passantino
0 comments:
Post a Comment