Cat’s meow
Adorable kitten comedy will melt your heart.
Keanu is named for Keanu Reeves only in the driveby sticking sense of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, whose dearly departed Comedy Central show adored absurdity. The movie should more accurately be titled World’s
Cutest Kitten, since the Keanu in question is an adorable furrball who manages to melt the hearts of L.A.’s most dangerous gangstas and wannabes, along with the tickers of everybody in the audience.
When the cat is in the picture, the movie is a whisker away from comedy purr-fection and who cares about Key and Peele?
In their big-screen debut, directed by their TV helmer Peter Atencio and scripted by Peele with show writer Alex Rubens, the duo bravely ignore the dictum often attributed to W.C. Fields: “Never work with children or animals.”
Even when Keanu (or WCK) isn’t in a scene, the film is still pretty funny, although the racial humour gets as repetitive as the gangbanger shootouts.
Key and Peele are above-mentioned wannabes Clarence and Rell, mild-mannered cousins and BFFs who adopt a stray kitty to restore Rell’s reason to live.
He’s been dumped by his girlfriend, who couldn’t abide his couch-surfing and bong-boosting ways (go figure).
Clarence and Rell don’t know that Keanu is the fleet-footed survivor of a crime-turf massacre seen in the opening frames, led by the sinister cloaked figures of the shadowy Allentown gang, who still have Glocks to cock.
Our hapless heroes are also brought up short when Keanu ends up in the paws of a drug lord named Cheddar (Method Man).
Cheddar also loves kittens — and don’t let that cheesy name fool you into thinking Cheddar’s a mouse.
Clarence and Rell adopt street names and attitudes, to bluff their way into Cheddar’s posse, which is guarded by the no-guff Hi-C (Tiffany Haddish).
This scenario allows free rein for patented Key and Peele riffing on race, rap and drug stereotypes while also freestyling on pop-cult obsessions — namely Clarence’s insane love of the vanilla music of George Michael while the ’hood’s white drug dealer (Will Forte) is mad for hiphop.
None of these jokers can scratch up a laugh or sigh like Keanu, who is assured of a sequel through a plot twist that’s as goofy as the film’s celebrity cameos. Did I mention he’s the World’s Cutest Kitten?
‘Catnapping’ scenario allows Key, Peele free rein to riff on race, rap and drug stereotypes while also freestyling on pop-cult obsessions