Nope

A rare misfire from Jordan Peele, Nope follows several characters, including Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ, Keke Palmer’s Emerald, and Steven Yeun’s Ricky, as they find themselves confronted by a mysterious creature that may or may not be extraterrestrial in origin. Filmmaker Peele, armed with his own screenplay, delivers a slow-moving endeavor that isn’t, generally speaking, able to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest, as the movie, which runs a palpably overlong 131 minutes, suffers from an arms-length atmosphere that’s compounded by its obvious lack of attention-grabbing elements and attributes – with this particularly true of Kaluuya’s closed-off turn as the far-from-sympathetic central character. (It’s as though Peele has instructed the actor to dial his natural charisma all the way down to zero.) And although the picture’s been peppered with a few admittedly stirring, engrossing sequences, especially an impressively tense interlude wherein OJ is confronted by shadowy figures within a barn, Nope‘s meandering, momentum-free midsection, which contains a thoroughly pointless and mean-spirited digression involving a chimp, paves the way for a muddled third act that’s hardly able to pack the exciting, engrossing punch one might’ve anticipated – with the end result an ambitious failure that rarely, if ever, lives up to the potential of its stellar premise.

** out of ****