The Warner Bros./New Line release debuted as a “work-in-progress” at SXSW ahead of its planned April 29 release, though it would take more than a few technical tweaks to significantly improve what feels, at the moment, like 100 minutes of hit-or-miss comic purr-gatory. That the movie reteams a number of collaborators from Comedy Central’s Key and Peele — including director Peter Atencio and screenwriters Peele and Alex Rubens — would seem to bear out the notion that their distinctive brand of double-edged satire is best served and consumed in five-minute sketches. Keanu, by contrast, is one flabby tabby that seems to be overstaying its welcome at the half-hour mark, and leans heavily thereafter on over-the-top violence whenever it’s clear the jokes aren’t landing.
That tendency is apparent in the opening sequence, in which the notorious Allentown brothers (imagine darker, longer-haired, more offensive versions of the Salamanca cousins from Breaking Bad) stage a bloody attack on a church where drugs are being secretly manufactured. The lone innocent bystander is the aforementioned kitten, who through some miracle of CGI rendering manages to survive, dodging bullets left and right in slo-mo, and even winning over the brothers’ cold, black hearts before escaping and making its way to the suburbs of Los Angeles. There, the tiny furball winds up on the doorstep of Rell (Peele), a pot-smoking underachiever who, having just been dumped by his girlfriend, embraces the kitten as a divine offering and christens it Keanu.
And why not? Much like the actor whose name he borrows, kitty Keanu makes an effortlessly expressive camera subject and requires no dialogue — only a nimble physicality and a series of adorable, quizzical reaction shots — to thoroughly magnetize the screen. Further cementing the connection, the movie is intended in some ways as a John Wick, the thrilling 2014 action film in which Keanu Reeves avenged the murder of his own beloved pet. Audiences familiar with Key and Peele’s pop-cultural savvy will be unsurprised by the various on-screen allusions to crime thrillers like Heat and New Jack City, plus throwaway comic references to Fargo, The Shining, Crimson Tide and Point Break (all of which figure into one of the movie’s better visual gags).
That tendency is apparent in the opening sequence, in which the notorious Allentown brothers (imagine darker, longer-haired, more offensive versions of the Salamanca cousins from Breaking Bad) stage a bloody attack on a church where drugs are being secretly manufactured. The lone innocent bystander is the aforementioned kitten, who through some miracle of CGI rendering manages to survive, dodging bullets left and right in slo-mo, and even winning over the brothers’ cold, black hearts before escaping and making its way to the suburbs of Los Angeles. There, the tiny furball winds up on the doorstep of Rell (Peele), a pot-smoking underachiever who, having just been dumped by his girlfriend, embraces the kitten as a divine offering and christens it Keanu.
And why not? Much like the actor whose name he borrows, kitty Keanu makes an effortlessly expressive camera subject and requires no dialogue — only a nimble physicality and a series of adorable, quizzical reaction shots — to thoroughly magnetize the screen. Further cementing the connection, the movie is intended in some ways as a John Wick, the thrilling 2014 action film in which Keanu Reeves avenged the murder of his own beloved pet. Audiences familiar with Key and Peele’s pop-cultural savvy will be unsurprised by the various on-screen allusions to crime thrillers like Heat and New Jack City, plus throwaway comic references to Fargo, The Shining, Crimson Tide and Point Break (all of which figure into one of the movie’s better visual gags).
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