Movie Review: Nope

The first trailers that came out for Nope were bizarre to me. They had this shtick about how such-and-such horse trainers had these deep Hollywood roots intercut with shots of the star galloping his horse down a road with those inflatable stick men you see outside car dealerships flailing alongside the road. I immediately said hell no. Later they had a trailer that said it was about aliens. They also gave us enough of a tease to make me say I'd try it.

I was gunshy about seeing another Jordan Peele movie because I absolutely loathed his second one, Us. Unfortunately he's fulfilled his M. Night Shamalamadingdong curse. After a brilliant debut with Get Out, we've now had two god-awful flicks from him.

Nope starts by introducing us to the incompetent main character, OJ (Otis Junior; kudos to Jordan for screwing up the movie's tone with that overburdened name). Remember all that horse heritage in the preview? Well, this scion of all that supposed greatness is a muttering fool who couldn't handle the most simple task of an on-set safety meeting. All he had to do was tell the cast and crew how to behave around horses, but he couldn't manage it. In rushes his sister who also fails, preferring to take the opportunity to sell herself. Then, less than a minute later there's a horse incident because the crew wasn't properly briefed. The Haywoods are fired and we're stuck with a film about two unlikable idiot siblings.

Then we're bizarrely introduced to the Haywood siblings' neighbor. We're shown a bloody set wherein a chimpanzee sits after having apparently killed a cast member. It turns out the boy actor in that show becomes the Haywood's adult neighbor. No fewer than three different views of that same asinine TV set are presented throughout the movie. It had no direct relationship to the story. It was backstory for a small side character. It's just one of a hundred choices Peele made in putting this movie together that had me shaking my head.

Long story short, it's an alien hunt. Can we capture aliens on film? I won't tell you, but I will tell you that the alien proper is the lowest-quality special effect I've seen in a modern movie. There were movies in the '50s that had better looking aliens. The alien in this movie looked like it was put together with dingy WWII parachute material.

The plot is so stupid that it hurts my brain to think about it. Mercifully, the movie does eventually end, but not with any sense of climax. It's just a shambles of a movie that lurches from scene to scene delivering a barely cogent narrative about three of the dumbest humans put on film trying to get their Ancient Aliens on. There is no rising tension, no climax, and no epilogue to tell us what happens to the Haywood twits.

Overall, it's a weak narrative about unlikable incompetent characters edited to be as unengaging as possible.

Don't watch this movie, not even for free. I don't think it would be improved by intoxicants unless you can come up with a mocking drinking game for it.

Jordan Peele is the new M. Night Shamalyan. I had such hopes for him.