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Key and Peele won’t be getting a Peabody Award for Keanu
BThe old saying goes that you can’t make a funny movie based on a single joke. However, the comedy team of Key and Peele show in their new film Keanu that a two-joke movie can be hilarious, as long as one of the jokes involves a kitten.
The kitten in this case is named Keanu, and he winds up on the doorstep of despondent photographer Rell (Jordan Peele), whose girlfriend just dumped him. Keanu immediately lifts Rell’s spirits and gives his new owner a new lease on life, at least until he’s kitten-napped by drug dealer Cheddar (Method Man). When Rell and his cousin Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) try to get Keanu back, they instead wind up as part of Cheddar’s crew, helping take care of the gangster’s business, including going along on a drug sale at Anna Faris‘ home.
Kittens are both adorable and hilarious, as millions of YouTube videos demonstrate, and Keanu director Peter Atencio (a veteran of the Key and Peele TV series) puts the title kitten through the wringer as it is repeatedly on hand during several bloody, slow motion shootouts among drug dealers and cops and always winds up, not only unscathed but also adopted, by Cheddar and a host of his rivals during the course of the movie. That joke always seems to work, in part because the various kittens playing Keanu are just so darn cute. In addition to kitten humor, the movie’s other running joke involves Key and Peele, perhaps the two most completely straight arrow, middle class black comics around, being mistaken by Cheddar for a pair of stone cold hitmen. The cousins try their best to live up to the roles, spouting F-bombs and N-words left and right, as they adopt their new personas as “Tectonic” and “Shark Tank.” Sometimes, the jokes work, as when Clarence instills a love of George Michael in Cheddar’s crew. And sometimes, they don’t, as with some bizarre dream sequences. In any event, the faux gangsta humor runs on too long, and little Keanu is absent for a considerable stretch in the middle of the movie. Still, Key and Peele have tremendous comic chemistry together, even when their material lags a bit. Like its title character, Keanu is a keeper.
Continue reading on Keanu: Mini-review
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