Keanu / by Kenneth Buff

Keanu is the first full length film by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, the comedy duo behind Comedy Central's sketch comedy show, Key and Peele. Now I was never a full time viewer of Key and Peele, but the stuff I've seen from it has been pretty great. The show gave us Obama's Anger Translator, funny sketches on black culture and history, and my personal favorite, Obama in College (it's especially funny to me because I've read his memoir, and it's a little of what I'd imagine Obama's college life was like). Now with such great sketches under their belt, you'd think they'd have one hell of a comedy they'd be bringing to the big screen, and well, while it's much better than many other comedies that have been shoved down our throats (*cough* Melissa Mccarthy) it's still not the action comedy romp the poster implies (go see The Kingsman for that. Surprisingly great action comedy. Spy was also pretty good, despite my disdain for Mccarthy's comedy pictures, Stathom really shines in that one).

So, Keanu's basic premises is two suburban black men accidentally find themselves immersed in the underground world of drug dealing to fetch a stolen kitten. The jokes come from all the drug dealers Key and Peele encountering being hard Wesley-Snipes-in-New-Jack-City black people types, so in an attempt to save their kitten they take on their hard black personas of Shark Tank and Tectonic. They come up with crazy stories of having rival drug dealers take out their appendixes when it comes time to compare scars. The jokes are decent, but they don't come often enough. On the plus side, the jokes are intelligent, and don't make you feel like the movie assumes your dumb, and only find babies puking and taking dumps in people's faces entertaining. This movie is a little deeper than that, and the audience's experience is all the better for it.