At Best, The Crude, Cute KEANU Is A Mild Chucklefest

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

KEANU
(Dir. Peter Atencio, 2016)

If you’ve been to the multiplex lately you may have seen a poster for a movie named KEANU featuring a cat wearing a baseball cap sideways, a do-rag, and chains over what looks like a bullet-proof vest.

But comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s first feature film after wrapping up their Comedy Central show Key & Peele after five seasons isn’t really about a hip hop gangsta cat – no, that’s just a selling point. The most dolled up that the cat gets in it is in do-rag and chains.

It’s really about two nerdy friends, cousins actually who live in the suburbs, who have to affect tough thug-like personas in order to infiltrate the Los Angeles criminal underworld to get back their kidnapped kitten.

The kitten named Keanu - reportedly they were working on the screenplay around the time that JOHN WICK came out - was found by Rell (Peele) on his doorstep right after he was dumped by his girlfriend, so he immediately falls in love with the brown tabby.

A few weeks later, when Rell and his cousin Clarence (Key) are out at the movies, Rell’s apartment gets broken into and they come home to find that Keanu is missing. Rell freaks out, calls the police, then figures that his pot dealer Hulka (Will Forte in cornrows) who lives next door might know something about the break-in.

Hulka points Rell and Clarence in the direction of “the 17th St. “Blips,” a supergang comprised of Bloods and Crips, that use a topless bar called Hot Party Vixens as their headquarters. That’s where they have to do some heavy code switching to get to the Blips’ leader, Cheddar (Method Man), who has Keanu in his possession and has named him New Jack.

Cheddar mistakes Rell and Clarence for The Allentown Brothers, a pair of psychopathic gunmen (also played by Key and Peele), and makes a deal with them that if they make a delivery of his new drug called “Holy Shit” they can have the cat.

Rell and Clarence, or TekTonic and Sharktank as they’ve started calling themselves, meet up with Cheddar’s crew: Hi-C (Tiffany Haddish), Bud (Jason Mitchell, Trunk (Darrel Britt-Gibson), and Stitches (Jamar Malachi Neighbors), and proceed to fake their way through a series of shoot-outs set-pieces which get a bit tiresome.

It feels weird to say that an R-rated comic action movie that drops the f-bomb and n-word seemingly every minute is a light comedy, but the shoe fits as I think I mainly giggled mildly under my breath throughout. Peele and co-screenwriter Alex Rubens are obviously going for a PINEAPPLE EXPESS-esque takedown of action movie tropes, in which our heroes actually get bullet injuries and many people get killed, but these types of '80s-style scenarios that always seem to climax with a mansion shoot-out have simply been satirized to death.

Key and Peele’s characters would be funnier if they were fleshed out more - I can’t even remember what jobs they were supposed to have – and a sideline subplot about Clarence’s wife (Gabrielle Union), who’s away on a weekend trip with their daughter and a friend (Rob Huebel) and his daughter, saying on the phone to Clarence that Huebel has been inappropriate seems like it’s a small bit from a sequence that had been largely cut (I bet that there’s a deleted scene from it on the upcoming Blu ray/DVD).

However, I did adore the setup, including the opening church massacre scene, that’s shot a la John Woo in stylish slow motion, as much as I adored Keanu the kitten (or the seven kittens that played Keanu), and was amused by random moments like Key smoking some “Holy Shit” and hallucinating that he’s in a George Michael video (there’s a running gag that Key is a big fan).

I kept waiting for big laughs that never came, so the best I can say is that the cute, crude KEANU is a mild chucklefest. Even if you’re a hardcore fan of Key and Peele (or cats), you may want to consider a matinee.

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Feeling Right At Home With The Authentic Tone Of Alexander Payne's NEBRASKA

Opening today at an art house near me:

NEBRASKA (Dir. Alexander Payne, 2013)

At one point in this excellent film, I was reminded of a bit that I saw late night talk show host/comedian Craig Ferguson do last month at the Carolina Theatre about how you can get away with saying practically anything cruel by saying “I’m not judging, I’m just being honest.”

As Bruce Dern’s long suffering wife, June Squibb is reminiscing out loud in a cemetery about folks she used to know in the film’s fictional small town of Hawthorne, Nebraska. In the mist of her blunt takedowns of the not so dearly departed she remarks of her husband’s sister: “I liked Rose, but my god, she was a slut!”

Comic actor Will Forte (Saturday Night Live, MACGRUBER), as Dern and Squibb’s son, snaps “Mom, come on,” but Squibb simply states “I’m just telling the truth” and continues her trash talking walk through the headstones.

It’s a fitting line, for NEBRASKA, Alexander Payne’s follow-up to his much more commercial George Clooney vehicle THE DESCENDANTS isn’t judging its characters, it’s being honest about them. Its simple premise of Dern’s protagonist Woody Grant erroneously thinking he’s won a million dollars sweepstakes because of a piece of junk mail hawking magazine subscriptions superbly sets up a bunch of bluntly funny scenes, made all the more sharper by being shot in black and white.

Working with first time screenwriter Bob Nelson’s words, Payne gives us a road movie in the vein of ABOUT SCHMIDT (my personal favorite Payne), which bleeds through in such moments as Dern revisiting locations from his youth (the auto shop he used to co-own, his former watering hole, etc.). Shades of Nicholson’s Schmidt walking into The Tires Plus store that stands on the site of his childhood home for sure.

Despite the protests of mother Squibb (another SCHMIDT factor as she was the wife in that too) Forte opts to drive his ornery out-of-it father from their Billings, Montana home to the lottery office in Lincoln, Nebraska. They stop in Hawthorne for a family reunion, which includes a terrific turn by Bob Odenkirk (Mr. Show, Breaking Bad) as Forte’s older newscaster brother, the soft spoken Rance Howard (a great grizzled character actor who’s been in everything from The Andy Griffith Show to Seinfeld) as Dern’s brother, and Mary Louise Wilson (another recognizable longtime veteran of the big and small screen) as Howard’s wife.

A slimy Stacy Keach as Dern’s former auto mechanic partner makes it well known that he wants a cut of Dern’s winnings, as do ne-er-do-well nephews Devin Natray and Tim Driscoll, who have some of the film’s funniest moments especially in a scene where they mock Forte for how long it took him to drive the 750 miles from home to Hawthorne (Driscoll: “Two goddamn days from Billings!”).

It's a career best for Dern, once one of New Hollywood's shining lights of '70s cinema, who definitely deserves an Oscar nomination for his role as the ole codger drunkard, but Squibb steals large chunks of the movie with her fearless bluster. A scene in which she tells off the folks, “vultures” she calls them, clamoring for their cut of Dern's supposed winnings with a resounding f-bomb alone should get her a nomination nod from the Academy.

It's also great to see another side of Forte, as a somewhat beaten down smalltime stereo salesman dealing with a recent break up with his girlfriend of two years (Missy Doty). Forte's effective everyman embarking on a trip to bond with his father, and for a change of scenery resonates beautifully.

Speaking of scenery, the wide lonely spaces of the spare Midwestern settings that surround these sad characters look stunning through the lens of cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, who also shot Payne's SIDEWAYS and THE DESCENDANTS. Anyone's who's traveled across country through the empty terrains of America will get the ambience Payne is going for.

I felt right at home with the authentic tone of NEBRASKA. It has more genuine laughs than most comedies, and more heartfelt humanity than most dramas. It's a near perfect piece of major Payne that makes most of its indie competition this year look pretty shallow. And you know, I'm not judging - I'm just telling the truth.

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MACGRUBER: The Film Babble Blog Review

MACGRUBER (Dir. Jorma Taccone, 2010)



MacGruber! Making a movie out of a flimsy SNL sketch!

MacGruber! Which will most likely be clobbered by SHREK FOREVER AFTER's opening weekend grosses!

MacGruber! His movie actually doesn't suck!

MacGruber!!!!!

The first film derived from a Saturday Night Live sketch in a decade (the last being 2000's THE LADIES MAN) accomplishes something surprising - it's much better than the sketches on which it's based.

With a few exceptions, like when Betty White famously appeared as MacGruber's grandmother earlier this month, I've found the sketches to be irritatingly repetitive. They always concern a countdown in a control room in which Will Forte's MacGyver take off fails to halt a bomb's detonation because of whatever neurosis of the week he's dealing with.

Of course, you can't make an entire movie out of repeatedly blowing up the hero so borrowing heavily from the 80's action movie handbook we get a something resembling a plot. Which is - the ridiculously over decorated special operative MacGruber is called out of retirement because his arch nemesis, named...wait for it...Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), has stolen a nuclear warhead and threatens to, in his words, "turn Washington D.C. into a pile of ash."

Brought back into action by the always welcome Powers Boothe as Col. James Faith, the mulleted MacGruber assembles a team of beefed up "American heroes with over 100 years of combined combat experience." The early fate of this team is one of the better jokes in the film so I'll just say MacGruber has to make do with Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe) as his second in command, and Forte's fellow SNL-er Kristen Wiig as Vicki St. Elmo who is just as stuck in the '80s hairstyle and fashion-wise as our uber-unlikely hero.

There's a back story involving Kilmer's killing of MacGruber's fiancee (Maya Rudolph) 10 years previous which ups the stakes - MacGruber threatens Kilmer with his signature "throat rip" among other, uh, unsavory things. Apart from that it's what you'd expect, not that that's a bad thing, from an over the top action comedy directed and co-written by one of the minds behind SNL digital shorts like "Lazy Sunday." It's a hard R with more F-bombs than actual bombs, scads of crude juvenile humor, and the most hilarious sex scene since TEAM AMERICA.

By no means a comic masterpiece since it's a little too sloppy and choppy to qualify; MACGRUBER is funnier than it has a right to be.

Forte's fearless gusto - which means he'll even go nude for a laugh - and his mock egotistical line readings make for a performance that's maybe not a tour de force, but certainly a minor comedic triumph.

As his meek but eager love interest, Wiig registers much more favorably than in her recent blank slate roles such as EXTRACT, WHIP IT, and DATE NIGHT. This is sort of odd due to the purposely shallow nature of Wiig's character, yet she has some of the funniest bits in the film.



Kilmer comes off beautifully as the oily bad guy in Euro trash threads sporting a slimy smirk. It's the kind of role he's perfect for as it tweaks his former 80's it boy status and gives him big artillery backdrops to chew on.

Phillippe, apart from some celery silliness which I won't spoil, plays his role straight as if he's in an actual action movie and that's the right idea.

True satire movie-wise is hard to come by these days so don't really expect any of it in MACGRUBER. It has spoofery in its genes, but it's more content to exist in the margins of immature buffoonery.

For folks looking for a mindless summertime diversion with more than its share of decent jokes, it should do just fine.

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