Keanu (2016)

Keanu was cooked-up with a simple premise in mind; gangsters and hard thugs will melt in the presence of an adorable kitten. That's the joke that runs through most of Keanu, the first big screen film from the comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. And while that doesn't sound like enough to sustain a 90-minute movie, thankfully Key and Peele's charisma carry most of the film

Opening with a drug shoot-out, two assassins known as the Allentown Boys (Key and Peele) halt the massacre when a drug dealer's kitten approaches him. The silent duo adopt him as their own, but soon the kitten escapes into the home of Rell Williams (Peele), a recently dumped homebody who uses the kitten to get over his break-up. His best friend Clarence (Key) is an obsessive George Michael fan (his love of Faith is the movie's long-running gag that loses steam), and when Rell's kitten escapes, dubbed Keanu, Clarence joins him in infiltrating a gang that has taken possession of the kitten.

Key and Peele always traded off playing comic foil to one another on their sketch comedy show, and here they are reigned in to playing only three characters apiece. To watch them shift from normal, everyday guys to hard thugs is hilarious, and they carry out the task admirably. But they are limited to those two sides (the Allentown characters don't give them much room to exercise their chops), and one almost wishes they had gone full Monty Python and peppered themselves in various roles throughout the movie.

The transition from sketch comedy to full narrative can be tricky, and more often then not doesn't fly. Peele co-wrote the screenplay with Alex Rubens (a Key & Peele veteran), and it more or less holds up a three-act structure and hits the necessary dramatic beats to tell a story. But some of it is tiresome, specifically the violence, and I found myself getting a little weary of the film's repeated beats.

Not to mention that the screenplay ends with a fairly convenient outcome, including a gang member who was undercover the whole time, and Clarence finally learning to be a man and stand-up for himself. There is nothing innovative here, and the script likes a satirical edge that makes many of their sketches from their show great. There's a sly social commentary that is sorely missed here.

But what does work, works. The George Michael Faith gag, though long running, still provides laughs and culminates in a fairly ridiculous payoff. There is an extended cameo from a famous actress that is one of the films' more inspired scenes. And Key and Peele are great together on screen. But the biggest complaint anyone walking into this movie will have was there was not enough of the kitten. That little guy almost steals the show.