If you watched the trailer for “Keanu” – starring Jordan Peele and Keegan Michael Key of Comedy Central’s beloved series “Key & Peele” – and wondered “is this a real movie?” you’re not alone. Now, they’re hoping to translate their brand of comedy to the big screen in this take on black inner city action movies – like “New Jack City”, but with two nerds and a cute kitten at its center. As straitlaced Clarence (Key) and his stoner buddy Rell (Peele), the pair make the most of the movie’s intentionally dumb scenario.
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Key and Peele, both biracial, have always found comedy/commentary gold in their ability reflect on race and culture. (Appropriately, this happens while Rell and Clarence are out at what they refer to as a “Liam Neesons” film.) He learns that the cat-napper is a gangster named Cheddar, played by Method Man, whose fame as a rapper is eclipsed by the fact that he has the best actor’s name in Hollywood.
To help Reeves deliver a memorable vocal performance, Peele said the actor was given some amusing direction.
Granted, “Keanu” is mostly made up of two or three jokes stretched paper thin – Clarence’s love for George Michael, for instance, is milked longer than the pop singer’s actual career – and some of the bits may have worked better in a five-minute sketch. This leads to a strip club called HPV with a two-for-one lap dance special, run by drug dealer known as Cheddar (Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man).
When it comes to Keanu, certain expectations need to be left at the door of the theater when you walk in. This means they have to assume the role of gangbangers – which does not come naturally. They morph their speaking voices from “Richard Pryor doing an impression of a white guy”, and “John Ritter”, respectively, to an exaggerated gangster slang, n-word and all (after much discussion and deliberation). “You sound like John Ritter, like, all the time”, Clarence retorts.
Mission accomplished, Key and Peele. Rell tentatively tries to get close to Hi-C (Tiffany Haddish), a particularly fierce woman who seems to see through their pretense. One of the film’s funniest sequences finds Clarence hanging out in a van with some gang members and trying to convince them that George Michael speaks to their very souls (“Father Figure” is his jam). They also have a bona fide star in Keanu himself, who is frequently deployed for a fresh jolt of cuteness and even sports a human voice at one point that you won’t get bonus points for guessing who it belongs to. The Film Stage wrote: “Keanu is a lightweight film with heavyweight laughs, a completely satisfying comedy experience from start to finish”. The film also gets laughs from “Shark Tank” and “Techtonic” persuading young hoodlums to see the virtues in corporate team-building exercises and Michael’s post-Wham! ballads.
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In a particularly amusing gag, the assassins for whom the main characters are mistaken, hitmen so deadly they wipe out dozens of armed foes in the opening scene, are played by Key and Peele as well.
