Brian Hamilton

As a fan of Peele's other work, this one feels like it missed the mark, for me anyway. I'm not the kind of person that needs or even prefers that every thread in a film gets neatly tied off by the end, nor am I against red herrings as a plot device. That being said, this felt like a film that needed more run time to truly make all the points it was trying to make. Expository dialog that was clearly meant to be a vehicle for one of those many points seemed both forced and shallow, while somehow also intentionally (albeit not very successfully) cloaked in a few layers of irony. Also, just because a movie omits details/scenes/dialog that end up fueling discussion, does not inherently mean that it's good thing first of all, but secondly that it was the filmmaker's original intention to do so. In fact, the movie had a disjointed and hastily pieced together feel to it, owing I'm sure in large part to things like that. Ultimately, I found it verry difficult to feel invested in any of the characters or the story, which made the climax unsatisfying, the plot hard to follow, and meant any confusion was not likely to be alleviated. Maybe it's just an unfortunate product of the times that it's been released in. If that's the case, then this period of 'woke' writing in tv and films has clearly not yet passed.