Jordan Peele: A Bigger Conman Than Saul Goodman?

It's Jordan Peele, therefore it must be funny, smart and of the moment. His latest 'Nope' is one for 'intellectuals' to sit around drinking coffee and discuss their elitist takes on the superiority of so called elevated horror. 'Oh this new wave of horror from the likes of Jordan Peele and Ari Aster rather distinguishes itself from that bonehead Eli Roth' says one of them and the other replies, 'I couldn't agree more. I must say i do love that A24 shirt you're wearing. Do you know where I could purchase one of those, squire?'

Is Jordan Peele the messiah he's made out to be in modern horror? Or is he just a man who can pull out a Chicago sun roof or squat cobbler when asked to like TVs finest criminal lawyer Saul Goodman? Up to now, I have very much enjoyed the work of Mr Peele. Unlike many others, I'm not convinced he's made a perfect masterpiece (sorry Get Out stans) but in spite of his shortcomings he has proven himself to be one of the most interesting minds working in horror today. All this even after only two features, which is undeniably impressive. This hasn't stopped some weirdos from calling him the best horror director of all time. Get a hold of yourselves! Full respect to Mr Peele for Correcting these people and rightfully declaring that John Carpenter is the king in this arena baby! So yes, impossible to deny this talented still fairly new director of his achievements thus far.

Even in Peele's most lauded first feature his problems began to emerge. His main problem? Third acts. In this case, he made this fantastic satire and made full use of his comedy background (Key and Peele til I die, you can't beat the Neesons sketch) to create some genuinely new ground for horror. Yes, that good that the critics had to dig up all the old classics like Ganja and Hess and all the big black horror titles they could name. I recommend the documentary Horror Noire: a black history of horror for those wanting to find more in this field. My personal favourite (since we're on it then) is Tales from the Hood and I do hope that one day Bones gets more love. Snoop Dogg and Pam Grier, what's not to love?

Anyway back to Get Out, a film which was so good, it did for blacks, what the Stepford Wives did for women. When we get towards the big plot reveal that's when things get a little shaky. Tonally it changes massively and comes an entirely different movie. Up to that point the directions really controlled and the cameras more of a detached observer with some of those party scenes. The screenplay and the actors doing the work while the camera is going for this distanced cinema verité approach.

There's a clever voyeuristic effect in that you too are a guest at the party. Towards the end the style changes and it becomes a very trashy, chaotic and giddie movie. Luckily, both were very good at what they were doing and so they didn't cancel each other out as they should have. The switch was unusual but overall didn't completely destroy the movie. Do still have one issue, which is that he should have kept his original ending, which was a whole lot darker involving the police and the institutional racism side. There was a moment it seemed it was going that way. Very irritating as it would have been braver and more fitting to the original intentions of the movie.

As I said with Get Out, it wasn't such a problem at the time because of all the good it was doing for the rest of the movie. The fact it was pretty revolutionary cancelled out any little problems. It wasn't until Us came out that the Jordan Peele third act problem became so apparent and unavoidable. This time he comes up with another amazing idea about there being clones of ourselves living underground and being experimented on. Big up Michael Abels Tethered Mix of I Got 5 On It. The streets still remember. All the best stuff in this movie happens in act two when the counterpart creepy clones of the family appear at the gates ready to play. They all end up fighting each other and there's a wonderful use of NWA's 'Fuck the Police'. The ever hilarious Tim Heidecker even gets a cameo. Assume he's a friend on the comedy circuit.

During that second act we get the bulk of the brilliance of the movie. Fun trashy weirdness as well as our over reliance on technology and police being beamed back at us. That's where the ideas are at. For a brief moment they are neatly contained and then the third act arrives and dismantles everything. The film ends up with more ideas that it can contain and literally explodes. Peele's pursuit of an allegory becomes overwhelming and in trying to overexplain itself, collapses. The allegory is no longer neat, fun and manageable. Almost no allegory makes literal and perfect sense, the good ones are just about stripped down to the point where it can do enough to support the message. This chief bites off more than he can chew and forgets the important point that small can represent big. I maintain that he should have taken some notes from Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes remake. In that film, Mr Aja added in that the mutant family's defects were caused by government nuclear weapons testing at a particular site. Note that the allegory has been contained to one location. Consequently, it is believable and realistic. Had Peele done the same, his sophomore effort would have been excellent and closer to the quality of his debut. Instead, he came at it from the angle of 'I am Jordon Peele who just made an academy awards accepted horror movie and am the fucking man, get the fuck out of my way'. Let's just say I reckon it got to my man's head. He goes too big and tries to turn it into a national incident rather than local. Sometimes, i guess less is more. So keep your bloody dodgy government testing sample to a reasonable limit, ok?

Following Us, I was willing to brush off its disappointing finale and accept Peele's two film catalogue as nothing short of ambitious. In a time when so many directors can't even perfect the simple 90 minute run of the mill economic horror for a Friday night viewing, here's one guy that actually does have things he wants to say on top of that. Us even demonstrated some smoother capabilities in the genre tonally. This one had more focus on the trashy fun rather the other style he was practising in the first half of Get Out. Definitely had a lot to like about it. Therefore, I was ready to embrace his latest film Nope.

If you watch extra closely with Nope you'll see Jordan Peele trying to make a movie out of the complete nonsense on display. He never quite commits to anything. It's his longest film to date and it really does suffer because of it. As I've said he is pretty much incapable of grounding ideas. Normally I can appreciate the huge amount of ideas the movies contain. Contain actually being the wrong choice of words because his movies don't actually contain ideas. They seep out the edge of the frames destroying the movies integrity. We're three films in and for the love of God, someone please teach this man the three act structure. He's too good to be ruined by something so simple. Nope didn't even have the foundations and without them it just becomes these ramblings and doodlings with no cohesive meaning. This one never makes it out the sketchbook.

My expectations for Nope were pretty clear. In my mind, I assumed it would be comparable to Shyamalan's Signs in both aesthetic and experience. That is to say Aliens on a ranch, decent suspense and then a final idea so bad it threatens to derail the entire picture. Remember the water in Signs? Pre-water stupidity, I'm still convinced it's a solid follow to The Sixth Sense. Then boom turns out the Aliens can't hack water. New skit afraid of water. Swing away baby, Swing away! How ill-prepared were these Martians that they decided to invade a planet dominated by water? Fucking morons them UFO manning pillocks. Makes almost zero sense and its most definitely what's known in this business as a Deus Ex Machina. Nope didn't even fare as well as Signs. It never even cements itself for a single act. I was never fully convinced by it.

If Baz Luhrmann's Elvis project from earlier this year, Elvis, is guilty of hopping from technical achievement to technical achievement at the expense of narrative, then Peele's Nope is guilty of idea hopping at expense of narrative. The pair of them need to take a good long look at themselves and re-examine their approach to narrative.

What infuriated me most is that I was going in giving the big man Peele a handicap. I knew the third act would be poor so I was willing to let this man off for that part before I even went in to the cinema. However, it soon settled in that I wasn't even enjoying the first two acts. There was no way out for Peele. He'd fucked this one up well and truly.

Around the second act some interesting ideas do begin to emerge. An argument is put across that blacks have "had skin in the game" since day one of cinema. Therefore it's Peeles time to do his version of the western the way it was meant to be. So forget Muybridge or Ford because Peele's about to set things straight. I was all geared and ready to enjoy something like that. Too bad my man can't even make a good genre picture out of this. There were undoubtedly routes Peele could have taken here or at least tried to. We get these potentially interesting stabs at commentary on trained animals in Hollywood. Had it been more of this Once Upon a Time in Hollywood type movie but with trained animals and not stunt men I'd be calling it the movie of the year. Anything for more of Steve Yeun and his monkey. What even was the monkey really about? The nerds keep talking about how Kaluuya's characters profession as an animal trainer is what makes him geared to handle the aliens. I picked that up and I'm all for the writing and the visual elements substituting for in your face dialogue but is it interesting? Not exactly in the way Schrader's underrated The Card Counter comments on its central character. As limited as it is in Nope, fair play though for at least attempting to make the characters profession integral to the plot. Doesn't happen enough these days.

Still confused by the Tarantino style horse vignettes being used as the structure of the movie. What on earth was that about? Seemed like a cheap trick that never really paid off and was no better than the kind of rip off antics you'd see in Bullet Train. Peele keeps the music exciting though, he hasn't quite lost that part to his game. It's nothing as memorable as the way Us was commenting on the difficulties of parents trying to explain more adult things they enjoyed when they were younger to their children and it's not Redbone in Get Out. Regardless, there was something pretty cool about the music blasting out across the empty ranch and some of the wild band T shirts on display (big fan of the stoner metal band Earth getting some representation in cinema. That's what we come to see!)

When the third act comes in, it's somehow even worse than I envisioned. Instead of expanding on the ideas being set up sloppily in the second act it throws them out the window for the worst kind of disaster movie imaginable with abysmal set pieces. What is that scene geography? For such a professional with a budget like this it's embarrassing. They set it up reasonably nicely making full use of Peeles Deniro Daniel Kaluuya (still glad at what the director and his star have formed together over the last few years and am still looking forward to more collaborations). As he waits around for the shit to go down you almost feel they're on to something. They cut back and forth between them at their stations but once it kicks off you can't really tell who's where and what's going on.

I could not fucking stand the design of the Alien. Once it began attacking I was like oh shit roll up the credits, you're done Mr Peele. Imagine independence Day without Emmerich's charming humour. Is this the best you can do? Why couldn't he have just stuck to his little western. Rather just watch the incredible 70s classic Boss N*gger again if I knew this man was going to bottle this so hard. Nope is not signs. This is The Happening. Its fucking Cowboys Vs Aliens 2. That's how bad Nope turns out.

Nopes had more than enough time to settle on me now, I've read nearly everything I could get my dirty little hands on about it and I still think it's absolute garbage. I remain baffled by its success and am very much open to hearing what people think about it. Almost everything I've encountered so far has just made me laugh. What a load of wham. Just wham. Keep reading about how it's this high concept critique of the "spectacle". Yet the film it says has almost nothing to say about that. In fact, the only way I can register this film as a genius take on our obsession with spectacle is by observing the way the film has been received. In that regard, it's an overwhelming success in the sense that Jordan Peele fails to land a single idea (yes not one) and yet people have eaten this shit up like it's the work of God. It's been sold on nothing other than name only. People have been totally consumed by nothing. Consequently, maybe it is accidentally the greatest film ever made about the "spectacle". He wanted to give us the spectacle and he sure as hell gave one for better or worse. A one trick pony with more ploys up his sleeve than the Albuquerque con man or a misfire from someone who will go down as one of the best? Jokes aside, he'll be back. He'll be back.

Bonus Points for:

-Having a homicidal maniac monkey

-Daniel Kaluuya being cool

-The Earth band t shirt

-Referencing Muybridge

-Saluting our great animal performers in cinema

Overall Score: 1.5/5 5