Keanu Movie Review

Keanu (2016)

Keanu -

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Written by:  Jordan Peele, Alex Rubens
Directed by: Peter Atencio
Starring: Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Tiffany Haddis, Method Man
Rated: R

My rating is simple, Watch It, It Depends, Skip it. Read my previous movie reviews!

Plot
Cousins pose as drug dealers to retrieve their stolen kitten Keanu.

Verdict
The humor relies on awkwardness. Two straight arrow guys get mixed up with drug dealers while trying to save a cute kitten. While each scene is more absurd than the last, this really feels like an extended television skit. What works on a short skit doesn't quite translate to a feature length movie. The kitten does an amazing job though.
It depends.

Review
Rell (Jordan Peele) must retrieve his kitten Keanu back from a local drug dealer and brings along his cousin Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key). This imagines what would happen if you pretended to be a dangerous gangster and didn't get laughed out of the building or killed. Clarence is leveraged for comedy as he is completely out of his depth. While Rell doesn't fit in, he has enough street smarts to fake it.
Method Man is Cheddar, the kingpin that has Keanu. In The Wire (2002-2008) he had a re-occuring role as Cheese. That has to be intentional.
They inform him,  "We're in the market for a gangster pet." He'll let them have the kitten if they do a job for him.

This parodies action comedies, including the tropes of mistaken identity and in over your head. Despite some doubt, Rell and Clarence are believed to be the dangerous criminals, the Allentown brothers. I didn't realize the Allentown brothers were played by Key and Peele until the credits. The brothers feel like an extreme version of the Salamanca cousins from Breaking Bad, murderous hitmen that don't say a word.
While it's absurd that anyone would believe the button down shirt wearing, mini-van driving Clarence is a gangster, it has a bit of credence. Who else would be crazy enough to walk into a den of thieves and demand to see the boss. They're just odd enough that they're given the benefit of the doubt.

There is the undertone of undermining stereotypes, at least in the beginning. Clarence and Rell discuss how to code switch so that they talk like the drug dealers. Clarence is very much a typical dad character, but relies on what he's seen in movies to sound the part.

This movie runs on absurdity, each scene more absurd than the last. To impress the crew, Clarence now known as Shark Tank runs up the wall and does a flip, surprising even himself. The reactions are great. He then manages to bond with the gangsters over George Michael music, and is impressed at how well the gangsters communicate later during a firefight after his training.

There is a scene where the kitten speaks, and of course it's voiced by Keanu Reeves. It's a silly movie, but fun. There are many scenes that would work great as a comedy short, but for a movie I want more clever than absurd. This is absurd, but only on a small scale. The satire never quite hits hard enough or goes big enough. The end suffers by including a lot of cliches without much hilarity, the concept just couldn't be stretched any further.