NOPE – Review
130 Minutes, Rated R
Written and Directed by Jordan Peele

**NOTE: I have updated this post with the audio of our discussion, and you can read Ryan’s review HERE.**

Synopsis:

The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.

After the previous runaway success of his first two features, Get Out and Us, Jordan Peele has established himself as a force in modern horror cinema.

Get Out was a subtle yet stinging commentary about race relations, while Us broadened out the Us/Them (no pun intended) social dynamic and made it more about class than race.

Regardless, his weaving of social commentary with horror elements was a breath of fresh air from most modern, hack and slash-based, horror.

I, personally, enjoyed the hell out of both of them.

Consequently, the bar for his latest feature, NOPE, has been set pretty high, and fans are expecting nothing less than perfection.

Sadly, no one, not Kubrick, not Hitchcock, not Carpenter, has a perfect horror track record, and it looks like NOPE is the first misfire for Peele.

The suitably cryptic trailers promise one thing, but once the film actually gets rolling, we get something different.

And not necessarily in a good way. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but NOPE is, frankly, a bit of a mess.

The pacing is slow… like super slow. And that slowness doesn’t really accomplish much of anything except extend the runtime. At 130 minutes, NOPE could easily have shaved 15-20 minutes off and, while it might not have made a better movie, it definitely would have lost one of the negative checkmarks against it.

Because the story is just kind of… not there. We start with a family drama-esque film, with Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as semi-estranged siblings dealing with the crazy death of their father in the opening.

Once things start happening around the ranch, NOPE morphs into a fairly typical monster-chase format: cameras, theories, third-party interlopers…

Then things go completely bat-shit crazy, as we see Steven Yeun’s character (a former child-star… don’t get me started on that sub-plot…) also attempts to discover/explain/exploit the happens in the area.

It doesn’t end well.

Don’t get me wrong, though, Peele utilizes every single inch of California sky and landscape and puts together a stunningly beautiful, damned near idyllic, viewing experience, but…

Ultimately, NOPE just doesn’t hang together as a single film as well as Peele’s previous films, and while folks are going to try to find an easy social or political theme to hang on the film, it’s not going to be as easy as Get Out or Us; NOPE will require some intellectual and cinematic gymnastics to find something that fits all the disparate elements here.

What’s strange is that it’s not like I can say NOPE is a bad movie; it’s not.

It’s just not a particularly good one.

Even with a great cast and good performances, it’s just kind of… there.

Whether that is the result of too high expectations or an actual drop-off in quality–a bonafide miss, if you will–might take some further analysis and discussion (which I’m sure we will have) to determine.

So if you want to know if this is NOPE or nope?

“nope.”

NOPE hits theaters July 22 and stars Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, and Brandon Perea.

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