That tendency is apparent in the opening sequence, in which the notorious Allentown brothers (imagine darker, longer-haired, more offensive versions of the Salamanca cousins from “Breaking Bad”) stage a bloody attack on a church where drugs are being secretly manufactured. “Keanu,” by contrast, is one flabby tabby that seems to be overstaying its welcome at the half-hour mark, and leans heavily thereafter on over-the-top violence whenever it’s clear the jokes aren’t landing.
PEELE AND KEY MOVIE
That the movie reteams a number of collaborators from Comedy Central’s “Key and Peele” - including director Peter Atencio and screenwriters Peele and Alex Rubens - would seem to bear out the notion that their distinctive brand of double-edged satire is best served and consumed in five-minute sketches.
The Warner Bros./New Line release debuted as a “work-in-progress” at SXSW ahead of its planned April 29 release, though it would take more than a few technical tweaks to significantly improve what feels, at the moment, like 100 minutes of hit-or-miss comic purr-gatory. Enjoyable for a good 15 minutes or so, mostly due to the scene-stealing powers of the adorable, much-coveted kitty whose name gives the movie its title, this is otherwise a stale, repetitive effort whose one-joke premise - two suburban buddies forced to pass themselves off as gangsters in a grimy underworld where they clearly don’t belong - never achieves comic liftoff, much less the richly subversive dimensions typical of Key and Peele’s best work. A two-hour online cat-video binge would yield as many “awws” and probably far more laughs than “ Keanu,” an initially amusing but fatally overstretched action-comedy that marks a lamer-than-expected big-screen outing for Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele following the conclusion last year of their frequently brilliant cable series.
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