“… we wrote the whole thing, the first draft, without a kitten in it”, Jordan Peele explains.
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While sketch comedy duo Key & Peele have established good chemistry and have proven to have the ability to create humor in small doses, “Keanu” is an uneven, hit-and-miss try at their first feature film together. Peele’s laconic charisma bounces just right off of Key’s manic patter, and the two find amusing individual moments concerning George Michael, a potent new street drug called Holy Shit, and a gang called the Blips-outcasts from the Bloods and Crips.
The result? Hopefully comedy gold.
Comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele star in the action comedy as friends who set out on a mission to rescue their stolen kitten, named after The Matrix actor, by posing as drug dealers for a street gang.
To watch all of their (hilarious, often eerily synchronized) answers to redditors’ questions, check out the full YouTube playlist from their Reddit AMA.
Even when Keanu (or WCK) isn’t in a scene, the film is still pretty amusing, although the racial humour gets as repetitive as the gangbanger shootouts. “They had a great tone you don’t see in movies anymore”. In the dumps over a breakup, Rell finds a new love when a tabby kitten shows up on his doorstep.
Peele said the kitten’s objective in this film is to allow the audience to connect with the intense situations the two main characters experience. Check out the rest of Atencio’s interview here for some more behind-the-scenes intel about Reeves’s involvement, and see “Keanu” when it hits theaters on April 29.
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. “We just hope we’re displaying that to people”. “Not just black dudes, not just white dudes but every gender and race, and what we found is because of our identity there is a lot of material about what it means to be mixed that hasn’t been done before”. But the comic momentum never quite grinds to a halt, and even if the occasional attempts at genuine pathos come up short, “Keanu” is still an entertaining extension of the “Key & Peele” aesthetic. It doesn’t hurt that they’re working alongside one of the cutest kittens ever. “Once you have this wild card in this animal, everybody gets real insular all of a sudden and decides we can’t screw around”.
In the film, Peele’s character is a pot-smoking loser who doesn’t appear to be doing much with his life, and Key is a well-spoken and well-dressed married man. The geeky buddies decide to head down there to get the cat, but worry they aren’t black enough, so they adopt different voices and nicknames like Shark Tank to sneak in. Key is Clarence, a husband and father.
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In Clarence and Rell’s necessary transformation from middle class to gangsta, Peele and co-writer Alex Rubens opt for played-out behavior in their screenplay, starting with rapid-fire use of the N-word, baggy clothes, and gravelly voices.
