quote:

But unlike Eddie Murphy, a masterful actor with a mature sense of humor, Peele fails because has not created credible characters. Chris and his ghetto friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), who works for the TSA, are attitudes, not complex beings. The other blacks Chris encounters as servants on Rose’s family estate are no better than Trayvon Martin–type effigies — zombie-like when not sorrowful and tearful. Exploiting black people’s tears, paranoia, and pain without providing reflex is offensive.

Get Out is an attenuated comedy sketch in which serious concerns are debased. Pushing buttons that alarm blacks yet charm white liberals, Peele manipulates the Trayvon Martin myth the same way Obama himself did when he pandered by saying, “Trayvon Martin could have been my son.” That disingenuous tease is extended in Peele’s casting of Daniel Kaluuya. Son of Ugandan parents, the handsome, round-faced, British-born actor triggers sympathy (he has the young, clean-cut buppie co-ed look that brothers Branford and Wynton Marsalis rocked in the ’80s).