Rob Peace Review: Jay Will Is Saving Grace Of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Poorly Written & Directed Biopic

British actor-turned-director Chiwetel Ejiofor premiered his sophomore feature Rob Peace at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Adapted from Jeff Hobbs’ 2014 biography, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, the film is a hollow examination on inner city life and the impact it could have on a young man’s future. Surely Ejiofor meant well with his reflection on the unjust occurrences in Rob’s life. However, it ultimately came off as too rushed when covering its grounds. The film takes more emotional hits than it delivers on quality storytelling, resulting in an experience that feels incomplete yet exploitative.

Rob Peace is a biographical drama written and directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor and was released in 2024. Based on the biography by Jeff Hobbs, Rob Peace follows the titular man who grew up in a life of poverty and crime in New Jersey but still managed to attain an Ivy League education at Yale while making money selling marijuana on the side.

Pros

• Jay Will is charismatic and brilliant.

Cons

• Ejiofor’s direction lacks the confidence to criticize the injustices that Rob faced.
• Rob Peace is emotionally manipulative yet empty.
• The script fails to tackle the mental anguish that comes with familial and societal pressures.

Rob Peace starts off well with Rob’s voiceover explaining how one house fire changed his life, and we learn that it has jump-started Rob’s passion for science. We skip ahead to 1987 Orange, New Jersey, where a young Robert (Jelani Dacres) idolizes his father, Skeet (Ejiofor). Their relationship is an interdependent one — Rob trusts his father’s every word and Skeet sees his son as the neighborhood’s future savior. As time goes on, one unjust ruling leads to tragedy, and the script explores how familial pressures can lead to poor decision-making in a system that sets Rob up for failure.

There’s not much I like about Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Rob Peace. There’s quite a bit of detail missing to help audiences understand the gravity of Rob’s circumstances. Rob went from idolizing his father to being his father’s only saving grace. The mental anguish that ensues when a parent is now the dependent takes its toll, and Ejiofor’s story refuses to dive deeper into this. Minor conversations reveal information, and it gives you just enough to pique your emotional interest. However, Ejiofor’s direction lacks the confidence required to fully explore how a tragic ending can come from such a bright future.

Rob Peace Plays Out Like An Important Perspective Is Missing

Skeet puts enormous pressure on his son to get him released from prison when Rob’s priority has already shifted to his future. Rob is brilliant, and he’s just been accepted to Yale University. However, Rob’s allegiance to his father threatens his academic promise. As with most of us in the Black community, there’s an added pressure of catering to your family’s needs while trying to individualize yourself and make a better life in the process.

It’s a conundrum of doing what’s best for yourself to help your community versus putting all your effort into helping the ones that need you the most. Yet, there’s no exploration of this, nor does Ejiofor explore the mental health impact on Rob. As a result, it comes off as empty. One of the worst parts comes when Rob’s white roommate compares his relationship with his father to Rob and Skeet’s. The scene is enraging. “My Dad would never allow me to risk anything,” Hobbs says. Well, congratulations on being in a position where you don’t have to!

It feels like common sense to not compare the two completely different situations and relationships, but this script does far worse. I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised, especially since the script harped so proudly on the white legacy students not getting in trouble for the same thing a student of color would as a humorous tool. Whether or not the real Hobbs said this is something I don’t know, but it came off as completely tone-deaf in the film. And it’s yet another example of why this story doesn’t work.

There’s a moment towards the third act where I started to see some improvement in the writing, but by then it was too late. This comes after countless times when characters talk about how great Rob’s heart is or how it’s important to do things from the heart. Not only was this cheesy, it completely relies on the dialogue over building authentic relationships. Without the spoon-feeding, Rob Peace could have worked. But the script doesn’t trust the audience to make up their own minds and judge what we’re seeing for ourselves.

Poor Storytelling Choices Result In Empty Emotions

I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that Rob Peace is devoid of all emotion, but every time there was a glimpse of rational sentiment, it was undercut by a poor directional choice that I couldn’t look past. Even moments between Rob and his mother are nearly forgotten about, as there is a large stretch of the film where Jackie’s presence is nonexistent, or she doesn’t even check up on her son.

It’s challenging for me to believe that a mother who once told her son that “for once in your life you can just breathe and find your dream,” wouldn’t check in on him at all. It feels empty, tasteless, and unrealistic, especially since he had plenty of time to accept calls from his father from jail. It removes the true heart of the film. And once again, we have a film that invalidates the importance of Black women when it comes to parenthood.

The saving grace of the film all comes down to Jay Will’s breakout performance. Rob Peace simply does not work without him. Will’s charisma and dedication towards showcasing the light that Rob was offers a comfort to me that this film as a whole failed to provide. Will perfectly encapsulates the inner turmoil felt by Rob with concrete emotion and balance. I just wish the script had done him justice.