Rob Peace movie review & film summary (2024)

Among all the other things it is, “Rob Peace” is a portrait of a type of extraordinary individual whose prodigious gifts are yoked into service by others who don’t have such gifts. Rob’s father is the number one example—watch how he goes from being tearfully grateful for his son’s help to seeming like he feels entitled to it, and makes the lad feel guilty for not spending every waking moment living for his father. But Rob is also a beacon of what’s possible for a lot of other folks in his life, including high school and university classmates (he has the rare ability to draw people from a lot of different demographics together to party) and people in the neighborhood. There’s a even a subplot about Rob and a couple of his friends realizing early on that there’s money to be made in buying and “flipping” houses, to make a little bit of money off the gentrification that started transforming a lot of urban neighborhoods after the turn of the millennium, including East Orange and Newark’s. Rob’s got the vision, but he also has the skills, and it soon becomes apparent that the skills are part of what gave him the vision. You see this idea expressed even in little moments, like when Jackie and Rob have a household budgeting conversation and she reflexively has him do all the math.

“Rob Peace” is an ambitious, probably overstuffed movie that tries to pack an eventful life and all of its wider implications into two hours, and could easily have run three, or been a TV series. Some elements feel truncated or skipped-over, but that’s the nature of the project—another tragic inevitability. (Old movie biographies used to be able to get away with it, though: they’d give you 20 minutes on a character’s childhood, then glimpses of three or four distinct parts of their life, then wrap things up and roll the credits, and somehow nobody felt cheated.)  

It’s also a populist work aimed at a wide audience. It’s a shame that movies like this no longer get mainstream theatrical distribution (unless they star Will Smith—and even then it’s a dice roll) because it seems to have been made with audience reactions in mind. Ejiofor’s direction and Masahiro Hirakubo’s editing leave space for laughs, tears, gasps, and side-talk. There are a lot of moments where Rob is knocked down by a challenge, overcomes adversity, or makes what we know is a big mistake even though he doesn’t at the time, and you just know that you’d be able to feel an audience’s collective emotional connection to the material at the cellular level if you were watching it in a theater. The best thing about this movie, though, is that it never holds your hand and tells you that if the movie feels one way about something and you feel another way, you’re somehow “watching it wrong.” If anything, it errs on the side of telling you that you’re going to come out of this movie feeling as if you’ve seen a story that doesn’t fit into one box, or even several boxes, because nobody’s life does.