Keanu Reeves Page 6

Keanu Reeves picks up his supremely efficient hitman immediately where the 2015 original left him: regrouping with his new, as-yet-unnamed dog after taking down the New York mob that he used to work for. Director Chad Stahelski and writer Derek Kolstad have created another unusually satisfying action thriller, with sharply developed characters and a plot that holds more water than most of these kinds of movies. Obviously, it can't be as fresh as the first film, but it's thoroughly entertaining.

Reeves' John still just wants to be left alone, but after taking care of one loose end, he is contacted by Italian mafioso Santino (Riccardo Scamarcio), who calls in a blood oath. Unable to refuse, John heads to Rome to carry out a hit he knows will make his life exponentially more precarious, especially as it puts him into conflict with his old friend Cassian (Common). Sure enough, he now has an army of goons chasing him, led by mute thug Ares (Ruby Rose). So he returns to New York and gets in contact with an underground guru (Laurence Fishburne) who might be able to offer some respite from the hordes trying to kill him. And manager Winston (Ian McShane) is also willing to help John, as long as he abides by the rules of the criminal underworld.

The film is another superb mix of cool imagery and coherent action that moves briskly from one brutal encounter to the next. Vicious gunfights and car chases abound in this movie, and all are staged with bracing energy and a heightened sense of realism. Through all of this, Reeves maintains a sense of weary dignity in finely tailored suits that are refreshed after each messy encounter. How he keeps walking and fighting after each bruising fight is another question.

Continue reading: John Wick: Chapter 2 Review

Alcoholic police detective Todd Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) has just finished wrapping up a notorious kidnapping case when Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whittaker) gives him the bad news. His ex-partner Terrence Washington (Terry Crews) is talking to Internal Affairs, and bureau head Captain James Biggs (Hugh Laurie) is looking to take Ludlow down. Before he can intimidate his former friend into not snitching, a pair of gang bangers kill him. Desperate to clear his own name in the death, Ludlow begins to investigate. Soon, he's linking the crime to a couple of local drug dealers who seem incapable of committing the hit. With Wander on his side and Biggs on his back, it will take all the street savvy he has to solve the case -- that is, if someone doesn't try and permanently stop him too.

Continue reading: Street Kings Review

Kevin Kline plays Joey Boca - a guy who runs a pizza parlor in Seattle - as an oversexed, extremely Italian workaholic who is able to explain his chronic infidelity by saying with a straight face, "I'm a man, I got a lotta hormones in my body." It's a clown's performance, a filmmaker doesn't bring Kline in for this sort of role and demand subtlety but rather one that's so over-the-top it achieves a kind of genius that Kline also showcased in his similarly stereotypical role in A Fish Called Wanda (in that one, he played a clown's view of an American abroad, here he's the clowning pizza man, bad accent, bushy mustache and all).

Continue reading: I Love You To Death Review

Pretty badass, right? Definitely. Deep and meaningful? Hardly. This is a violent and apocalyptic story, based loosely on the Hellblazer graphic novels by comic book legend Alan Moore. And much to the relief of comic book fanboys everywhere, this adaptation adheres to the heavy, religious-war foundational spirit of Moore's work.

Continue reading: Constantine Review

The movie begins when a deranged mad bomber, Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper), severs cables to an elevator inside a Los Angeles skyscraper. The bomber demands $3 million ransom or he'll blow the emergency cables. LA Bomb Squad members Jack (Keanu Reeves) and his partner, Harry (Jeff Daniels), must defuse the bomb before Payne blows the cables. This situation alone could provoke a feature length thriller, but it merely serves as the first act for Speed.

Continue reading: Speed Review

To understand why, let's just dive right in.

Continue reading: The Matrix Revolutions Review

The Replacements is a hokey mistake of a football film, a mishmash collage of one-dimensional characters, rampant stereotypes of cultures and races, cliched emotional statements of purpose, and Keanu Reeves wishing for The Matrix sequel to start principal photography. The story is loosely based around the pro football players' strike in 1987 and a rag-tag team of replacement football players taking up the reins of professional play for a variety of teams with names like the Washington Sentinels. Keanu Reeves stars as Shane Falco, a has-been football college player looking for redemption. Gene Hackman dons a fedora like Tom Landry and speaks with gusto like a certain coach in Hoosiers.

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The latest from Sam Raimi (For Love of the Game) is a muddled thriller, filled with tired clichés and some of the worst casting in years. Raimi, along with screenwriters Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, try so hard to create a "serious" psychic chiller that the film is practically drained of any excitement.

Continue reading: The Gift (2000) Review

The Matrix Revisited is now on hand to tell anyone who cares to listen and learn about the most minute facets of the making of The Matrix, exploring everything from the studio's early nervousness to fight training to storyboards to wardrobe to the pioneering and widely-copied "bullet time" camera trick. While you've seen a lot of these before on endless behind-the-scenes documentaries. (In fact, you've seen some of this on the original Matrix DVD, which some correctly feel is robbing us, at least a little, by not simply including this documentary with it in the first place.)

Continue reading: The Matrix Revisited Review

About half way through "The Matrix," the ostensibly intellectualand certainly expensive virtual reality sci-fi thriller starring KeanuReeves as a genius hacker, the movie turns suddenly simple, as if a WarnerBros. exec showed up on the set and said "I don't get it. You're gonnahave to dumb this down for me."

The writing-directing team of brothers Larry and Andy Wachowskicomplied, and once the movie peels away the mystery of the world in whichit takes place -- which happens about 40 minutes into the story -- it becomeslittle more than wildly over-produced string of action sequences, pausingonly for the obligatory smarmy remarks made between barrages of fancy weaponsfire.

Continue reading: Matrix Review

Here's your review of "The Matrix Reloaded" in a nutshell: One incredibly cool, gravity-defying, CGI-aided, swirling-camera kung-fu melee; one jaw-dropping, 100-mph, against-traffic freeway chase; and way, way too much long-winded, expository, circular, self-important, pseudo-philosophical yappity-yappity-yap.

Writing-directing brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski saddle their cast with endless equivocal prattle while toiling to buttress the complex plot and metaphysical undertone of this picture's uber-stylish 1999 predecessor, which saw what we think is the real world exposed as an elaborate virtual reality prison for the minds of all humanity. Mankind's suspended bodies provide a power source for a race of machines, which a small band of escapees are hoping to destroy in the post-apocalyptic world outside the Matrix.

"We can never see past the choices we don't understand," sage but elusive cyber-prophet The Oracle (Gloria Foster) preaches cryptically to Neo (Keanu Reeves), the cyber-Messianic hero whose realization that physical laws don't apply in the Matrix led to the first film's groundbreaking wire-work martial arts fights and bullet-dodging slow-mo stunts.

Continue reading: The Matrix Reloaded Review

While blessed with entertaining performances and uncommon earnestness (for a Hollywood movie) about the tribulations of middle-aged romance, there's something a little too artificial about "Something's Gotta Give."

Taking place largely in a Hamptons beach house (that is quite obviously a soundstage) where a divorcee playwright (Diane Keaton) has been duped into acting as nurse to an aging playboy (Jack Nicholson) after he's had a heart attack while fooling around with her flighty daughter (Amanda Peet), the film's snappy sense of humor is all too often undercut by affected romantic chemistry and by the overuse of facile cinematic conventions, like musical montages of characters laughing, talking and drinking wine while the camera circles them in the candlelight.

As written and directed by Nancy Meyers ("What Women Want," "The Parent Trap" remake), the unlikely love story that forms between Nicholson (who prefers "the complete, uncomplicated satisfaction of the younger woman") and Keaton (who has been adjusting to independence and getting over old-fashioned notions of spinsterhood) is a source of sophisticated laughs -- with the occasional low-brow guffaw thrown in for good measure (say, Nicholson's posterior peeking out of a hospital gown).

Continue reading: Something's Gotta Give Review

The eye-popping, heart-stopping last hour and a half of "The Matrix Revolutions" more than makes up for everything plodding and ponderous that has taken place since the mind-blowing first hour of the 1999 original.

Astonishing in scale and momentous in scope, it encompasses a spectacular battle between the scrappy, out-numbered but heavily armed defenders of Zion (humanity's last refugee city hidden deep beneath the Earth's scorched surface) and a million-strong swarm of enemy sentinels (those frightening, giant squid-shaped robots) invading from the machine-ruled surface world.

But the monstrous melee may be for naught if uber-human messiah Neo (Keanu Reeves) cannot defeat the invincibly evil, incalculably self-replicating rogue computer program known as Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) in a simultaneous, nuclear-strength airborne-kung-fu showdown inside what's left of the crumbling Matrix (that virtual world pulled over the eyes of the comatose majority of mankind kept in stasis by the machines who feed off our life-force).

Continue reading: The Matrix Revolutions Review