3.5 stars out of 5
Did I enjoy this movie as much as Get Out and Us? Nope. The good news is, Jordan Peele is becoming a more skilled filmmaker with each outing. The bad news being, artfulness does not always result in pure viewing satisfaction.
Opening segment: creepy, weird, and awesome; no spoilers. After that, I briefly thought I was watching Montana Story again, as brother O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) and sister Em (Keke Palmer) reconnect at the rural family ranch, complete with horses, and try to carry on after the death of their father. (Wait… O.J.??) The Haywood family business is training horses for the movies, and this nicely ties to African-American history and the earliest days of cinema.
We meet their reliable client, former child star Ricky (Steven Yeun), who runs a nearby Wild West family attraction.
And, you guessed it, crazy shit starts happening. In a clever and very of-the-moment twist, instead of cowering in fear, Keke suggests monetizing the phenomenon.
So, all good so far. But Peele spends entirely too much of the film setting up the story, He did this in Us as well, but in that movie the first half was taut and tense (prior to the delightfully batshit payoff), while in this one it’s kind of slow… and meandering; there are frights and oddness but not enough to really pull me in.
The acting (and/or direction of the actors) is also at fault. Kaluuya was superb in Get Out but here the Brit plays an inland California cowpoke as taciturn and grumbly, and doesn’t exactly light up the screen. Yeun was really good in Minari but here he’s trying too hard to be a guy who, um, tries too hard to be fun and funny — but with buried childhood trauma — and Yeun just doesn’t nail it. Brandon Perea comes off real phony-baloney as a Geek Squad employee who helps the Haywoods with their security cameras and gets caught up in the spookiness. Only Keke Palmer — dancing, strutting, full of attitude in a Jesus Lizard t-shirt — really shines here.
The last section does deliver the wildness, terror, and laughs we now expect from Peele, and sure, a little bit of stupidity. The music is great, there are some very cool and clever visuals and sequences, and I did enjoy this movie. Just — after the very high bar set by Us — not as much as I hoped to.
Jack Silbert, curator