Photos courtesy of Warner Bros.
If a kitten hadn’t been the pivotal point of New Line Cinema’s crime comedy Keanu, I wouldn’t be reviewing it here and I definitely wouldn’t have seen it. I don’t have a taste for silly, violent comedies. And despite the kitty presence, the film isn’t for kiddies—if you took the kitten out of the film, you’d still have been left with the violence, killing, drug manufacture and use, naked women and a lot of nasty language. But there was a cat in it, and I went, and I thought it was a pretty damned funny film, which I’m not embarrassed to say that I fully enjoyed.
That’s because of the players in the production. Keanu is a collaborative project produced by comedy team Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, along with Peter Principato, Paul Young and Joel Zadak. The cast is a gifted bunch that includes screen and comedy veterans Nia Long, Will Forte, Luis Guzman and Tiffany Haddish and some handpicked, virtually unknown actors. Key and Peele associates Peter Atencio and Alex Rubens respectively directed and co-wrote the film with Peele; in keeping with the sense and smarts of Key and Peele’s productions, Keanu isn’t a series of loosely connected shock-value scenes characterized by over-the-top performances. Instead, it’s a non-preachy parable about finding your inner self—in this case, your inner badass, when it’s necessary—and the humanity and humaneness in everyone—even the single crumb found in the two otherwise unredeemable characters.
Keanu’s setting is LA, but don’t look for familiar landmarks or haunts, because it was filmed in New Orleans. The movie opens with a slow-mo automatic-weapons bloodbath between the monstrous Allentown Brothers, Oil and Smoke Dresden (Peele and Key in dual roles), and a drug-manufacturing operation headed by one King Diaz (Guzman). Diaz isn’t around—he’s enjoying life in his McMansion—but his tabby kitten, Iglesias, is. Halfway through the bullets and blood, one of the Allentown Brothers picks up the kitten and, as the audience holds its breath, looks at him like King Kong checking out Fay Wray and chucks him under the chin. Iglesias, though, is out for his own pelt (he’s a cat, you know) and escapes through an unrelenting hail of gunfire and colliding objects and bodies like the action hero that he is. He runs through the mean streets of Los Angeles, across busy highways, through urbs and suburbs, and arrives at the apartment door of graphic artist Rell Williams (Peele).
Rell has been grieving over a bad breakup and has about given up on his career and art, but the unexpected appearance of the kitten turns him into mush, with a mission. A film buff, Rell names his new friend Keanu and makes him the creative centerpiece of a calendar project complete with miniature movie sets: Keanu bursting through the shower wall in Psycho, Keanu riding a red bicycle in Peewee’s Big Adventure—12 months of adorable.
Meanwhile, Rell’s cousin, Clarence Goobril (Key), is a corporate nerd contentedly living the family life in a lovely neighborhood of Craftsman bungalows. When his wife (Long) goes away on a weekend trip with their male neighbor and both their daughters—the neighbor’s wife is sick and can’t make it, and you know that this can’t turn out well—Clarence and Rell have a tame boys’ night out at a movie. When they return home, Rell’s place has been ransacked. The camera pans to Keanu’s collar and name tag lying forlornly on the floor, prompting an anguished “No-o-o-o-o!” from Rell.
Suspecting that Rell’s next-door neighbor, Hulka (Forte, in a hilariously controlled performance as a literally dopey weed dealer in dreadlocks from scalp to beard and God knows where else), was somehow behind it, the cousins barge into his house and shake him down. Here we get the first hints of both men’s inner warriors, particularly Rell’s, who will brook every obstacle to getting his beloved kitten back.
Keanu, they find, is likely in the possession of the 17th Street Blips, a gang formed by former members of the Bloods and the Crips. Rell and Clarence beat it down to the gang’s headquarters, a down-at-heel strip joint called Hot Party Vixens, whose unfortunate acronym looms large on a sign. There, they find Cheddar (rapper Method Man), his second-in-command Hi-C (Haddish in a characterization of a bad girl that scotches all clichés and is full of surprises), a pet boa constrictor, and a ragtag bunch of bangers played to the hilt by Jason Mitchell, Jamar Malachi Neighbors and Darrell Britt-Gibson. And Keanu is there, too, sitting on Cheddar’s lap with a doo-rag on his head and bearing yet a third name, Li’l Jack.
Key and Peele’s linguistic gifts go into full drive as they slip into a struggling code-switch. They manage to convince a suspicious Cheddar and his crew that they’re a couple of badasses named Tectonic and Shark Tank and just may be the dreaded Allentown brothers. For his less flush cousin’s sake, Clarence offers Cheddar $100 for the cat, saying that they’re in the market for a “gangsta pet.” Out of curiosity as to what the two fools are really all about, Cheddar promises them the kitten if they’ll go along on a sell of his product.
This is where the film takes off in earnest. Clarence as Tectonic uses his corporate training to teach teamwork to Cheddar’s gang. He introduces a traditional icebreaker activity in which each member tells a little something about himself or herself. Each response from the “team members” unnerves the cousins, notably when Blip member Stitches mutely rams a lit cigarette into his own hand without wincing. Later on, while waiting in the lookout car while the drug sale is going down inside, with Rell and Hi-C playing truth or dare with three Hollywood Hills wannabe hipsters, the bored Blips pick up Clarence’s iPod for some cool sounds and wind up with George Michael. In one of the funniest sequences in the film, Clarence runs damage control on himself and convinces his three seatmates that George Michael kicks every other artist’s ass into the next county, to the point that a scene cuts to the four of them singing along to a Michael mix with his eyes closed and one of the Blips gets an ink tattoo on his chest of a misspelling of Michael’s name.
It’s no spoiler to say that everything turns out OK in a sense, even for the victims in the most cold-blooded group murder in the film, which includes a cameo appearance by Anna Faris. Especially for the cat. And about that cat….
“We had the script and were feeling pretty good about it, but at a certain point, Jordan asked, ‘Where’s the heart?’ Can we get an ‘awww’ in there without sacrificing the rest of it?” Rubens said. Solution: a kitten, for what Peele called “the symbol of our heart and journey.”
“There’s almost a ‘meta element’ in that the way this cat wanders into Rell’s life kind of matches the process of writing the movie,” Rubens said. “Suddenly, we ‘found’ a cat, and the story had a whole new life to it. We loved the ridiculousness of the situation, that it’s all about this tiny kitten.”
Actually, it was a lucky seven of them. Kittens—even kittens that bear strong resemblances to one another—aren’t at a premium, especially during kitten season, and the producers adopted three of them from a shelter at eight-weeks-old each, the minimum age that the American Humane Association (AHA) allows for training in movies. As the filming continued and the kittens became noticeably older, four more were adopted to keep the main character’s youthful appearance. The AHA was involved from beginning to end to make sure that the kittens were treated properly, but they didn’t have to worry. According to the production team, all demands, especially the kittens’, were met, and the little guys had the same effect on the cast and crew that they had on the film’s characters. This excepted the boa constrictor, who was the only cast member not allowed to interact with the kittens.
Trainers April Mackin and Larry Payne said the kittens were perfect subjects—they took to the training and also had individual personality traits that made each of them good in different scenes and circumstances. At least one reportedly joined the family of a production manager.
“They truly went from rags to riches,” Mackin said. “It was awesome that we not only found kittens that were perfect but we were also saving lives.”
I trust that all the cats were spayed or neutered when they reached the proper age and that the ones who didn’t get permanently adopted are now SAG/AFTRA members. I also wonder whether striped cats will become the pet du jour the way Dalmatians did after 101 Dalmatians and Chihuahuas did after the Taco Bell commercials drove people goo-goo over them and, after the novelty wore off, dumped them in shelters or streets. But again, Keanu isn’t a family film or omnipresent on TV, and as one rescuer suggested to me, it’s not likely that people react to cats the way they do with dogs when one becomes popular in a film.
I’m not strewing the end of the article with photos of adoptable tabbies because, as another rescuer friend told me, any cat or kitten can be your Keanu—one that you’ll go to the end of the earth for and battle any monster—human or otherwise—to protect. And for me, that was the heart of the film.
I have to squeeze in here that Keanu is a seasonal film inasmuch as we’re now in the throes of kitten season. So especially if you don’t need a film to inspire you to adopt a cat that you’ll love until the end, visit a shelter or a rescue and adopt a kitten. Or an adult cat—they have their inner Keanu, too. And please make sure you get them spayed or neutered—there’s no danger of running out of kittens for the Keanu sequel. I’m convinced that there will be one—there were two strong indications, one at the end of the movie and the other after the credits roll. And I’ll no doubt see it.
God created domestic cats so that men might touch tigers.
— Unknown