Jordan Peele's Nope and the Buck and the Preacher Poster on the Ranch House Wall

NOPE 

(Jordan Peele, US, 2022, 131 minutes) 

Like Jordan Peele's first two films, Nope is filled with signs and signifiers. 

Many viewers will probably miss one in particular, simply because it only makes a brief appearance in the background: a poster for Sidney Poitier's 1972 directorial debut, Buck and the Preacher, a rare Black western made at a time when African-American actors and filmmakers were more frequently associated with blaxploitation films and social problem pictures. 

The poster doesn't just confirm that Nope is a Black western--with sci-fi and horror elements--but that Peele, like the multi-talented Poitier, is his own man. It's understandable when actor-turned-directors engage in fan service. It's a great way to please their base and put food on the table, but Nope is even less of a sop to the punters who made his first film, Get Out, a deserved hit than Us, a harder-to-pigeonhole proposition that pleased critics more than general audiences. I predict a similar fate for Nope. 

If Peele's third feature has the moody lighting, spooky music, and jump scares associated with horror, it isn't a horror movie in the conventional sense. If anything, a lot of the horror moves are fake-outs. Not to give too much away, but some of the scariest moments turn out to be pranks. 

The Buck and the Preacher poster also suggests something more specific: that Otis Haywood (the invaluable, if underused Keith David), a horse wrangler, may have worked on the film. 

Considering that he would've been a teenager in 1972, it's even more likely that his father or grandfather worked on it, because Nope centers on a multi-generational family of Hollywood horse wranglers, the kind of behind-the-scenes players who help bring movies, TV shows, and even commercials to life with little fanfare for their efforts. 

If Netflix's The Harder They Fall recreated the Black western as something cool and sexy--to mixed results--Nope takes a less stylized approach to the work of the Haywood clan. Rather than looters and shooters, they're experts at a legitimate craft. 

 

After Otis meets his maker, due to a freak atmospheric event--which will become freakier and more frequent as the film gathers speed--Otis "O.J." Haywood, Jr. (Get Out's Daniel Kaluuya, who won an Oscar since he last worked with Peele) has taken over the family business. He may know horses, but the unfortunately-named O.J. has less of a head for business. 

This state of affairs sets the scene for the events to come. With bills to pay, and insufficient paychecks to keep up with them, O.J. has been selling off horses for ready cash. He aims to earn enough to buy them back, but he can't do it on his own, since his vape-happy sister, Emerald (Hustlers' Keke Palmer, the firecracker this somewhat slack-paced film needs), prefers to promote her own projects over getting her hands dirty with wrangling. 

 

O.J. finds one revenue stream in actor-turned-theme park impresario Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yuen, last seen as another dedicated patriarch in Minari) who has a need for trained horses. The two share a connection to Hollywood through Jupe's participation in an Indiana Jones-type action-adventure movie and a '90s sitcom about an all-American family and their pet chimp, Buddy. 

Jupe's acting career came to an end when the chimp went nuts on the set, violently attacking the cast (chimp madness aside, Jupe appears to have been inspired by Ke Huy Quan of Everything Everywhere All at Once). 

 

Peele uses sleight-of-hand to depict the bloody devastation. Now Jupe--and his fantastic red Nudie suit--oversees a family business, much like his Haywood neighbors, in which the parents and the kids put on a show revolving around Jupe's encounters with the rumored alien in their midst. 

It's no spoiler to say that fiction will soon become fact. It's through O.J. that Jupe finds out about the UFO. When O.J. first notices it in the airspace above their spread, he tells Emerald, who springs into action with a plan to save the ranch: they'll capture footage of the alien spacecraft--if it is indeed a spacecraft--and sell it to the highest bidder. This leads them to electronics store worker Angel Torres (The OA's Brandon Perea), a bored kid who inserts himself into their scheme, and eccentric cinematographer Antlers Holst (24's Michael Wincott), who provides the camera expertise they lack. 

And that's the gist of the thing, except the Park-Haywood story strands never converge in a satisfying way, and it doesn't help that Jupe proves more dynamic than O.J. Though Kaluuya plays his role exactly as Peele describes it in the production notes, the director appears to have miscalculated to some extent, since O.J. marks Kaluuya’s least engaging performance to date. 

 

I appreciate the contrast between him and his extroverted sister, and O.J.'s ability to control his emotions serves him well once the alien menace closes in, but a summer spectacle, to borrow Peele's term, calls for more colorful characters, like the council dwellers that populate Joe Cornish's Attack the Block, a 2012 sci-fi comedy that cost one-sixth as much as Nope. Though it failed to recoup upon its original release, the film developed a dedicated following on home video, and launched alienslayer John Boyega into the Star Wars stratosphere. 

In addition to Kaluuya’s recessive performance, the new film's pacing feels off. I'm all for slow and steady build-ups in sci-fi scenarios, except the Arrival-type pace feels all wrong for a lighter, more fanciful effort like Nope.

Poitier's Buck and The Preacher, meanwhile, which focused on newly-freed slaves trying to forge new lives for themselves, opens with inter-titles that conclude with the following statement, "This picture is dedicated to those men, women and children who lie in graves as unmarked as their place in history." In focusing on a Black family of Hollywood horse wranglers, Peele has played a part in shedding light on some of the Black and Brown below-the-line talents that have helped to bring his own moviemaking dreams to fruition (just as Mexican-born Buck and the Preacher wrangler José María "Chico" Hernandez helped to bring Poitier’s dreams to fruition). 

 

If Nope doesn't completely work as the summer spectacle Jordan Peele intended, that still seems like a pretty worthy achievement to me.

Nope opens on Friday, July 22. Images from BBC Culture, Maja/Pinterest, Universal/Teen Vogue, and MoviePosters.com.