Keanu Reeves Hall of Shame

Hey guys, welcome to the weekend at The Tagline! As promised, today we will take a moment to honor Keanu Reeves, and the numerous ridiculous roles he has played. For those that have somehow missed out on the heartthrob sensation that is Keanu "The One" Reeves, he had his first breakout hit on the big screen as a stoner named Ted in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. After that he was... still Ted for a while, in a tv series, and also a sequel to the original movie. That's a lot of Ted! After that he was in other movies, where he wasn't Ted, but he still often seemed like a stoner, because well... he's one in real life. Perhaps his best known role was as Neo in the in-retrospect-not-nearly-as-cool The Matrix. But I'm not going to talk about that (not the first one anyway). So without any more gilding of the lily, let's get to exposing Keanu's great shame, with his 3 worst movies. I could've made it 5, but I really want to tear into just these special 3.

Keanu Reeves' Hall of Shame

This poster looks like a modern spoof.

Speed(1994): Yeah that's right, Speed. If you were like six in 1994, let me fill you in. Speed is a movie about a guy (Dennis Hopper) who is blowing stuff up, because he wants lots of money. In an effort to get what he wants, Dennis Hopperbomber puts a bomb on a bus. This bus has Jack (Reeves) a LA SWAT member, on it, along with Sandra Bullock, as someone who is on a bus. If the bus drops below 50 mph, the bomb will go off, killing all the people. The rest of the movie details them trying to defuse the bomb, and after that take out mad Dennis Hopperbomber. Also, while they are trying to disarm the bomb, Sandra Bullock and KeanuJack fall in love I guess, and that's the whole movie. When it came out, Speed was super successful. Worldwide it grossed 320 million dollars, and it received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics, who describe it using phrases like "white knuckle thrill ride" and other bullshit like that. Most of these reviewers admit that this movie is bare bones simple and dumb as shit, but somehow that's okay for Speed, but not for any other movie I ever talked about. Let me be so bold as to look back and say: Speed sucked balls. It was dumb, and I didn't like it. Suck it.

LOOK HOW TECHNO THIS IS

The Matrix Revolutions (2003): This also applies to The Matrix Reloaded, but I didn't want to talk about more than one Matrix movie, and this was by far the worst of the three. It was a steady trip downhill for the franchise (admittedly it took a sharp nosedive from one to two) and Revolutions was the cherry on top of the shit sundae. Picking up where Reloaded left off, The Matrix Revolutions can barely be said to be acted, because it has relatively sparse dialogue and character interaction compared to the amount of special effect robots blowing stuff up and really lame, completely gutless kung-fu segments. By that I mean that despite all the fighting, the combat sequences in Revolutions totally lack any kind of impact (unlike in the first movie, or even in Reloaded). Similar to in the second movie, Revolutions continued a proud tradition of contradicting everything that happened in the original movie. The part that pissed me off the most was definitely the machine guns on the hovercraft and the robot suits with machine guns, and everything just having huge vulcan cannons. Remember when they explained that EMP was their only weapon against the machines, and the climax of the movie revolved around Neo needing to escape the matrix before they used their EMP to kill a whole bunch of killer squidbots? Yeah well apparently the Nebuchadnezzar was just the lamest hovercraft in the Zion fleet, and was left out of the huge automatic cannon party. The movie exploded into a lame finale as well, involving one last completely crappy fight against Agent Smith, and then Neo exploding into a giant Jesustacular lightcross when he dies. Awesome. Despite getting panned by critics for all the reasons here and more, TMR somehow grossed 427 million dollars. Which makes me physically ill.

Ooooooh looks serious! And spherical!

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008): A remake of a 1951 film of the same name, this film focuses on an alien named Klaatu (Reeves) who is trying to change mankind's behavior and attitudes towards the environment, because polluting is bad and if you do it Keanu will come down from space and kill all the people in the world. Helen (played by Jennifer Connelly) hangs around with Klaatu, who is pursued by government authorities for being a weird alien, and tries to convince him that humans aren't assholes, despite the fact that all humans act like assholes to him. Jacob, Helen's stepson (played by Jaden Smith) is also an asshole, and sells out Klaatu to the authorities again, and that doesn't help the situation. Klaatu uses a bunch of nanites and spheres and robots called GORTs or something to KILL ALL HUMANS, but then changes his mind but we can't use electricity anymore somehow afterwards. I'm not explaining it poorly, the whole movie really just is as muddled and jumbled as my explanation above. Much like The Matrix Revolutions, this movie is short on plot, and long on IMAX special effects that don't add up to a whole lot of sense. Also Keanu Reeves manages to not even be able to act the emotional range or a robotic acting alien. The movie again received negative reviews but netted over 200 million dollars in the box office. Confirming that so long as there are flashy effects and Keanu sucking, a movie can be successful in IMAX.

That's it! We can all look forward to other crappy movies that Keanu Has made! There are a few others that might've made it onto this list, but I'm holding off on them because I intend to later do full posts devoted to them (you aren't off the hook yet, Keanu). Join me on Tuesday when I review the new Bruce Willis/JGL film Looper.