Review of Keanu (2016) by Allan C — 28 Apr 2016

I wouldn't say that I'm incredibly familiar with Key and Peele's works, although I have seen several of their sketches, and I found them all to be pretty hilarious. Keanu had pretty no advertising aside from a few sponsored ads on Twitter accounts of cute/derpy cats that I follow--yes, I'm that person; I'm sorry--so I essentially went to see this on a limb.

I wasn't really expecting a lot, and those expectations (or lack thereof) didn't quite affect anything. Keanu is a really messy movie, but it's also often times a hilarious one. It has a pattern of being gleefully ridiculous and then dragging on jokes and/or scenes for too long in order to reach a feature-length runtime.

The movie is solely about Rell (Jordan Peele) being depressed that his girlfriend broke up with him, and at the time of his grieving, a tabby kitten escapes from a drug cartel shootout and ends up on his doorstep--he's quickly loved and named Keanu.

When he goes to hang out with his best friend/cousin Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) and comes back home to find his house burglarized and Keanu missing, they go to find him. And that's it. The cat is pretty much the epitome of a MacGuffin, causing the two leads to get into a bunch of random hi-jinx.

If this sounds like an elongated sketch, it's because it kind of is. It's 98 minutes or ridiculousness, and it finds some really entertaining places to go all without taking itself all that seriously.

It's pretty much a series of outlandish set pieces, but all of them have their germs of ideas that work really well to an extent. Obviously Key and Peele are funny and have fantastic chemistry. They can riff off of each other about basically anything and make it work.

The rest of the cast also does a good job, namely Tiffany Haddish as one of the gangsters that the two leads have to play it cool around. As Key and Perele usually do, there's some very funny satire of gender and racial stereotypes, and it gives the movie a lot of its edge.

The over-the-top and often times parodistic action is entertaining for most of the movie, and I won't spoil anything, but there's on cameo that's truly well done on multiple levels. This all sounds pretty great, and it is for intermediate periods of time.

The pervasive issue with Keanu is that virtually every scene goes on for too long, starting with hilarious content and ending with what would usually be seen in the deleted scenes or line-o-rama section of a Blu-Ray release.

Again, the movie is 98 minutes, which is actually pretty short, but it just milks its jokes for too much time. While it may not have been the intention, there are a few scenes that felt like they were solely as long as they were in order to construct an hour-and-a-half movie.

Another issue is that after a while, the messiness of the script becomes more and more apparent. On top of it being structured like a series of set pieces, there's about a 45-minute period in which Keanu is never seen and very scarcely mentioned, leading to me think, "Wait, why is any of this happening?" The disconnect between the effectiveness of individual jokes and the consistency at which it works made it hard for me to decide whether or not this warrants a recommendation, but the flaws eventually become too apparent to ignore.

Ultimately, Keanu wavers between funny and excessive, and I actually had a hard time deciding whether or not this would really be worthy of someone's time. Some scenes work and some are cute or endearingly silly, but when something starts as hilarious and then wears thin--and then when this acts as a cycle--its the mediocrity that finishes off a scene that gives it less of a lasting impact as it should have.

There's hope for Key and Peele's future movies, but only if their efforts become less scattershot. 6.3/10, okay, one thumb down, below average, etc.