A big-screen walk on the wrong side of the law
|||keanu
DIRECTOR: Peter Atencio
CAST: Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Will Forte, Method Man, Tiffany Haddish, Luis Guzman, Nia Long, Jason Mitchell and Darrell Britt-Gibson
CLASSIFICATION: 16 LVD
RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
John DeFore
A TALE of code-switching, the enduring appeal of George Michael’s Faith and a feline that is all kittens to all people, Peter Atencio’s Keanu marks the first movie for Comedy Central sensations Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.
Playing middle-class cousins forced to impersonate gangsters so they can rescue the film’s eponymous pet, the actors make the transition with ease in a consistently funny action-comedy. This may not be adequate compensation for the end of their series, which gave them so many more opportunities to try on new personalities and take one-gag ideas for a spin, but it will delight the show’s fans, while winning over others who never saw it.
The actors do, in fact, get to play two extra roles here. They enter the film as a pair of “phantom” drug dealers from Allentown, who shoot up a rival druglord’s operation in a Carmina Burana-blasting sequence that could easily have been a Key & Peele parody. During the mayhem, we witness the escape of the victim’s pet: a gray-and-white kitty so precious that even a hypothetical, couldn’t-be-real movie critic with a deep-seated dislike for cats would find him adorable. The kitten scampers across LA, winding up at the doorstep of Rell (Peele), who has been in a heartbroken stupor since his girlfriend dumped him. Suddenly, life has meaning again. Naturally, Rell names his saviour Keanu.
Two weeks later, Keanu vanishes in a break-in. Rell and his family-man cousin, Clarence (Key), whose wife and daughter are gone for the weekend, set out to find the cat they’re sure has been kidnapped.
Which is less likely: that the men go to a rough-part-of-town strip club expecting to find Keanu, or the cat is there – renamed New Jack and now doted on by Cheddar, a drug merchant played by Method Man?
Though they enter the club wearing their dorkiest duds, Clarence and Rell try to fit in with thugspeak and puffed-up posturing. They claim to be the Allentown assassins when the opportunity arises, and stumble into an arrangement that could only make sense here: if they go out on a drug deal with this crew, they’ll be given New Jack as a gesture of respect.
Long before the men have run out of funny ways to flub the epithet-laden slang they’re trying to recreate based on films they’ve seen, Clarence and Rell are neck-deep in actual crime.
While making a delivery of Cheddar’s new drug, they find themselves at a movie star’s home and wind up leaving with blood on their hands. They also leave their crew changed in a way few will be able to predict.
Getting Keanu back can’t be this simple, and it isn’t. The kitty has won hearts all over LA and our newly emboldened heroes will stare death down, or cower before it, a few more times before this quest is complete.
Tragically for Key & Peele fans, none of their daring feats require cross-dressing. That’s an oversight that simply must be corrected in their next feature. – The Hollywood Reporter
If you liked Ride Along or The Brothers Grimsby, you will like this.