Review:
Rell, a stoner who's just been dumped by his girlfriend, falls head over heels in love with a kitten he finds on his doorstep. What he doesn't know is that the kitten, Keanu, belonged to a gangster who was recently killed in a brutal shootout. After his apartment is broken into and Keanu is stolen, he decides he'll do anything to get his little buddy back and convinces his friend Clarence to help him. Unfortunately, “anything” involves infiltrating a gang and pretending like they, a couple of middle class nerds, are hardcore gangsters. Meanwhile, several other gangsters want Keanu back (everybody loves Keanu).
I wouldn't have realized this movie was coming out or even have considered seeing it if one of my cat-loving coworkers hadn't shown me the trailer. We both thought it looked like an April Fool's joke, but we also both thought Keanu, the kitten, was adorable. Since it costs less than $4 for a matinee ticket in my town, I decided to go see the movie with a friend (another cat-loving coworker) when it came out.
I should probably state upfront that I'm not familiar with Key & Peele's comedy. I know their names, and that's about it. Judging by other reviews of this movie that I've read, there were a lot of inside jokes I missed because of this.
I didn't see the movie for Key & Peele or their comedy, I saw it for the cute kitten (which was actually played by seven cute kittens – I think I was able to identify four of them). That turned out to be a problem, because the kitten only got maybe 15 minutes of screen-time. They were a good 15 minutes, but still, not nearly what I was expecting considering how much of the marketing was devoted to cute kittens. Most of the movie was devoted to Rell and Clarence's cringe-worthy attempts to act like gangsters. Yes, I occasionally laughed, but mostly the secondhand embarrassment (and worry that they were going to get themselves killed) kept it from being as funny as it was probably supposed to be.
The ending was just...terrible. Really, really bad. Up to that point, Clarence's wife had felt like a real and relatively together person. Suddenly she morphed into a sex fiend who was too turned on by Clarence's recent stint as an action hero to notice or care that there were gangsters and police in their front yard, or that her husband was wounded. Hi-C's response to Rell was slightly less annoying, but I honestly would have preferred it if she had just ditched him, or kept their relationship at a “just friends” level. All Rell needed for a happy ending was to be reunited with Keanu – the romantic ending with Hi-C felt forced.
If you're like me and just wanted to see this for the cute kitten, all I can say is that this movie doesn't have nearly enough Keanu. Maybe watch the previews a few more times instead?
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