Movie Review: 'Keanu'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- For those of us who have both enjoyed and admired the splendid television work of Key & Peele, as they've kept the entertaining tradition of the actual abiding comedy team alive for us, the announcement that they were collaborating on a feature film sent expectations soaring.
Pity, then, that Keanu arrives -- as a sketch comedy series inadequately translated from the small screen on Comedy Central for three years to the big one -- as a disappointing underachiever.
Like a number of films over the years that began as seven-minute sketches – many of them emanating from, for example, Saturday Night Live – Keanu is misshapen as a feature film. Not that it's necessarily a one-joke premise, just that its stretch marks are showing.
It's an action comedy about a pair of suburban cousins, Clarence and Rell, played respectively by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, who must pass themselves off as drug-dealing gangsters and hitmen – that is, thugs, which they are anything but -- in an attempt to recover the kidnapped cat, named Keanu, who showed up on Rell's doorstep one day, was taken in to help console a depressed and recently dumped Rell, then was swiped from Rell's apartment during a burglary and disappeared into the Los Angeles underworld.
Clarence is a family man with a wife and daughter, both of whom are away for a few days, so he's available for this reactive caper.
And Will Forte, Nia Long, Luis Guzman, and Method Man are along in support of the comedy team at the helm.
The stars, director Peter Attencio (The Rig), and co-screenwriter (with Peele) Alex Rubens are all from the Key & Peele television series. But in this particular collaboration, they've made the mistake, in this action comedy, of including far too much action. All that the many shootouts and car chases and fistfights do is add to the running time by postponing the comedy. There is just nothing funny about the considerable over-the-top violence.
In other words, the sophisticated wit that was the hallmark of the TV series, with extensive social satirizing and genre spoofing, takes an unfortunate back seat to the obligatory macho miscellany and, consequently, the film struggles to achieve comedic liftoff in this uninspired exploration of the gang culture in Los Angeles.
It makes you wonder whether the Key & Peele brand of subversive satire, all that tweaking of racial and gender stereotypes, works better in brief doses. Time will tell.
In this case, it's decidedly hit-or-miss, with too little of the latter and too much of the former – just the opposite of their television-screen product, which teems with both subtlety and bite as it delivers hearty laughs that sting.
As for the pair's usually effortless comic chemistry, it falters, perhaps as a result of them having to work too hard to showcase their talents and keep the narrative engine running. Consequently, running gags run out of steam and the repetitive film overstays its welcome.
All of the above said, the loyal fans of the established comedy team may be more forgiving of Key and Peele's bumpy entry to the movie landscape. But folks new to their work will be hard-pressed to experience the comic brilliance they've heard so much about. They may instead find themselves humming the Peggy Lee song, Is That All There Is?
By the way, the title would seem to come from the film that perhaps served as primary inspiration, which is John Wick, an action thriller about a kidnapped dog starring – who else? – Keanu Reeves.
So we'll litter 2 stars out of 4. The key to the lack of appeal of Keanu is a lack of adjustment to the demands of feature filmmaking, which leaves this misfire not quite a cat-astrophe but far too far from purr-fect.
