The idea is so deceptively simple, it’s a wonder no previous film in the YouTube age has used it to this degree until now. People love videos of kittens doing adorable kitten things. So the master sketch comedy team of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele (who wrote this film with Alex Rubens) have devised a film prominently featuring a kitten being cute in some truly outrageous and violent situations involving gangs, drugs, weapons and the hardcore vocal stylings of George Michael. And I promise you, when the kitten known as Keanu is on screen, you will be actively in love with the film known as KEANU. The slight problem with that equation is that there are fairly sizable chunks of this movie in which the kitten is largely absent, and this presents the unlikeliest of problems: Key and Peele have problems keeping the laughs coming when there’s no Keanu.
I’ll give the duo credit for not simply taking a sketch idea and padding it with nonsense to fill out a 90-minute running time. Technically, they only play two characters each in KEANU, and only one set of those characters speaks. Peele plays Rell Williams, who is introduced as depressed and nearly comatose on his couch (after smoking a great deal of weed) after his girlfriend has just left him. Key plays his best friend Clarence Goobril, a married father of one, whose wife and daughter have just left for the weekend on a school trip, leaving him able to focus all of his attention on helping his buddy through his pain. But just before Clarence arrives, a stray kitten arrives on Rell’s doorstep, and he instantly becomes attached to the wee kitty, featuring the feline in a series of calendar photos of it in classic movie scenes.
Although the guys don’t know it, the audience knows that Keanu escaped a rather bloody scene that opens the film, involving a pair of monstrous assassins, Smoke & Oil Dresden, aka the Allentown boys (also Key and Peele), who shoot up a drug cartel ring to take it over, killing the head of the operation, who also happens to be Keanu’s original owner. The action set piece that opens the film is fairly spectacular with Smoke & Oil in long leather trench coats and doing flips with machine guns that borrow heavily from THE MATRIX and its star. But no one in this film gets more action play than the kitten, who slides across the floor, dodging bullets, explosions and falling bodies with the skill of Neo and all the cuddliness that comes with following in his footsteps.
When Rell and Clarence return to Rell’s home from a movie, they find it has been broken into and Keanu stolen, sending them down a road to hell in search of his irreplaceable cuteness. A quick trip to Rell’s drug dealing neighbor Hulka (Will Forte), points them to a local drug ring led by Cheddar (Method Man), who does in fact have Keanu, now wearing an adorable gangsta do-rag. His associates include Hi-C (Tiffany Haddish of “The Carmichael Show”) and Bud (Jason Mitchell, who was recently so impressive as Easy E in STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON), and all of them mistake Rell and Clarence for the Allentown boys, who they practically idolize for being so ruthless.
Cheddar agrees to give the guys the cat if they accompany his crew on a particularly dangerous mission, to show them the ropes and how to deal with uncooperative clients. I suppose one of the things KEANU addresses (barely) is code switching—the idea that these two black characters talk one way around their white friends and another way around other black people. Although I’m not sure that idea is really at play here since Rell and Clarence (who even admit that they normally sound pretty white—“You talk just like John Ritter all the time,” says one) are talking like gangstas and using the N-word almost constantly because they are pretending to be hardened criminals and not just because they’re around other black people. If this movie was ever partly about that, director Peter Atencio (who pretty much did all the “Key & Peele” episodes ever) does a great job of not calling attention to it. I think I have just that by writing about it more than anyone connected with the film does.
As if to underscore Clarence’s “whiteness,” there’s an overly long sequence with him and a couple of Cheddar’s underlings in his car listening to George Michael’s Faith album, and Rell convincing them that Michael is both black and about as gangsta as it gets. Far more interesting and amusing is Rell trying to charm Hi-C, who might be the toughest character in the whole film. He moves in with a bit of flirting and then retreats when she starts talking about something unsavory. The things Cheddar and his crew get these guys into during the course of the movie are unquestionably messed up at times, making us wonder more than once exactly how they’re going to escape criminal charges assuming they live through the night.
With some well-placed cameos from the likes of Luis Guzman and Anna Faris, KEANU manages to make it to a fairly surprising ending that works because the kitty is back in force and the film has a few twists at the end that make up for some fairly conventional, hit-and-miss material in the middle section. I’ll give the filmmakers and stars credit for keeping things moving most of the time, but the material runs out of gas at certain points, and we have to wait for a certain adorbs kitten to return to refuel the tanks. It’s a persuasive first feature from Key and Peele, with enough laughs to keep new and old fans satisfied to a point. I’d certainly love it if they kept working together beyond the series and this film—maybe in a sequel, but preferably in an original work. KEANU gets the job done without putting in any overtime.
