You can never go wrong by adding a cute animal to an adult-oriented feature.
Tom Hardy’s dog in The Drop, for instance, was the greatest thing about James Gandolfini’s last film. Or think of the adorable puppy in John Wick owned by Keanu Reeves for a few brief, unforgettable moments, the untimely demise of which sets him off on an entirely justified murderous rampage.
This is the joke that Keanu is centered around, that folks in movies will do just about anything to save a cute critter. In the case of heartbroken stoner Rell (Jordan Peele) and buttoned-down suburbanite Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key), that means infiltrating a drug ring by posing as a pair of murderers from Allentown and adopting, for lack of a better term, a "street" persona.
The cat in question is Keanu, a kitten who survived a massacre in a church at the hands of the real Allentown killers (also played by Key and Peele, albeit in heavy makeup) only to be kidnapped by Cheddar (Method Man) and his gang. Cheddar is slinging a new drug called "Holy Shit," which combines the effects of pcp, ketamine, and other sundry illicit narcotics in order to take people on a trip unlike one they’ve been on before.
Much of the humor—virtually all of it, really—derives from the culture clash inherent in a couple of suburban, more or less straitlaced black guys coming into contact with actual, hardened criminals. Clarence explaining the joys of George Michael to Trunk (Darrell Britt-Gibson), Bud (Jason Mitchell), and Stitches (Jamar Malachi Neighbors) while seated in a family van, for instance, is comedy gold. It plays on stereotypes to subvert expectations and prompt unexpected reactions in ways that make you laugh. That being said: This is tricky ground for a white critic to cover without being accused of some form of problematic thinking, so all I’ll say is that it made me giggle, repeatedly.
Key and Peele have excellent chemistry, as one might expect from a duo that churned out five seasons of critically acclaimed sketch comedy. Each seems to know exactly when to inflect the pitch of their voices and code switch so as to generate the proper wide-eyed response from his partner. They’ve also surrounded themselves with a top-notch team of actors, from longtime comedians such as Will Forte to relative unknowns like Britt-Gibson, Mitchell, and Neighbors.
That excellent cast papers over some of the film’s obvious deficiencies. As one might expect from what amounts to an idea for a skit being stretched into a 100-minute feature, Keanu lags at times; it could have just as easily been 80 minutes without missing a beat. Indeed, it probably would have made the beats that remained a bit tighter.
Still, Keanu’s quite funny and worth your time, even if Key and Peele ask for a bit more of it than they probably should have.