Confession time: I have seen a grand total of one Key and Peele sketch. I enjoyed it, realize that their brand of
comedy is likely something I would enjoy, but I just have never gotten around
to watching the show. I was, however,
excited to see their big screen debut, Keanu,
mostly because the premise has some real comedic potential. Here’s the problem, though: Keanu just isn’t a very good movie. I wanted to laugh, and I saw how the
situations could have been funny, but even taking away my cynical critical
lens, the audience around me wasn’t laughing either, which is an obvious
problem for a comedy.
Rell (Jordan Peele), a down-on-his-luck stoner, one day
finds an adorable kitten on his doorstep that he adopts and names Keanu. When his place is robbed after being mistaken
for his next-door neighbor/pot dealer, Rell embarks on a journey to recover his
cat from a local gang. Joining him is
his awkwardly uptight suburban cousin, Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key), and the
two must impersonate infamous killers in order to keep themselves alive and
deal for Keanu’s return.
Where I see a lot of potential for comedy is in Key and
Peele’s ability as character actors, as well as the chemistry they clearly have
from years of working together. Peele
plays with his character being not nearly as tough as he thinks he is in a way
that mocks Black masculine culture pointedly, and Key is such a blatant
antithesis to badassery that it’s genuinely endearing when he is the one
accepted into the fold of the kitten’s captors.
The comedians play off each other so naturally that it really is no
surprise to me that their show ran for five seasons.
But in transitioning to the big screen, Key and Peele have
hit the same roadblock that many sketch comics face, and that is that they aren’t
able to support the extended scenes inherent to the cinematic experience. There were a few instances where the film
felt inspired and chuckle-worthy, but there were many more times where I
thought a joke would have benefited from snappier editing or a quicker cut to
the next scene. This is most apparent
when Key and Peele don’t occupy a scene together, as they only have inferiorly
comic actors to bounce off of instead of each other. The film tries to solve these divisions by
intercutting between their concurrent scenes, but this causes both scenes to
feel too long and played out without ever hitting hard on their punchlines.
I saw this movie on 4/20, so you know that half the theater
was probably stoned; even then the most I heard were some weak snickers. The premise of this movie is fantastic, and
the raw energy and chemistry of Key and Peele make them appealing enough where
I’m not dissuaded from checking out their sketch show to see what the fuss is
about. But Keanu just isn’t a very funny movie, and that’s the biggest problem
a comedy can have. It’s not an easily
quantifiable thing to analyze; comedy just either works or it doesn’t. Here, it unfortunately doesn’t.
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