Comic duo Key & Peele abandon their best instincts in this leap to the big screen. Inspired silliness of its premise aside—three of L.A.’s most violent gangs go to war over a stupidly adorable kitten, basically—Keanu adds about 30 minutes of gun play and other predictable forms of noisy action-comedy bloat to a smart riff on black identity. A five-minute sketch would sharpen that idea to a fine point, and send it up at the same time, but hey, that’s never stopped a Hollywood accountant or Lorne Michaels, right? Still, when it hits, which is essentially whenever the two stars are on-screen together, Keanu is a lot of fun. Keegan-Michael Key is suburban dad Clarence, who “sounds like Richard Pryor’s impression of a white guy” and drives a minivan. Jordan Peele is his cousin Rell, a stoner movie buff who emerges from crippling breakup depression when he finds the titular tabby (“I think it’s Hawaiian for ‘cool breeze’”) sitting at his front door. When his house is mistakenly ransacked by a gang called the 17th Street Blips and Keanu ends up in the lap of psycho boss Cheddar (Method Man, enjoying himself), Rell’s inner gangsta kicks in—sort of. 

The best parts of Keanu have Rell and Clarence reluctantly going undercover as “Tectonic” and “Shark Tank”, with Cheddar being stupid enough to believe the two chino-wearing goofballs are legendary assassins from the dreaded Allentown Boys. They subsequently school the Blips on the finer points of George Michael and middle-management-style team-building, all while trying to maintain their cover (with Rell darkly warning at one point that if Allentown muthafuckas don’t get their sleep, they get “cranky”.) A cornrowed Will Forte, Anna Faris, and late-entering Luis Guzmán help keep the lunacy on just enough of a boil. Eventually the real Allentown killas show up, also played by the two stars like supernatural wraiths. This cliché might have gone somewhere if director and regular collaborator Peter Atencio had brought his Comedy Central game, but it doesn’t, and that’s the film’s biggest disappointment in a nutshell. Keanu is plenty loveable, but why’d they pull its claws out?

Georgia Straight, April 2016