Critics reviews

It never corals its themes into a successful comedy. The film is strange rather than funny, and often inexplicably separates its duo, splitting them off into parallel sketches that are crosscut with a drab and arrhythmic sense of timing. A potentially uproarious interlude between Rell and Anna Faris (as herself) has no punchline, and the momentum of the scene is frequently undermined by the lame segues to Clarence.

Key and Peele's jokes are adroitly timed and micro-attentively specific to their milieus, but the smallness and safety of the same relatively mild joke being hit over and over has diminishing returns.

Who is the intended audience for Keanu? If it's for the duo's loyal fans, the movie is disappointing yet fun; if the film strives to introduce the team to a wider audience, it's also fun but doesn't begin to display their talents; and if it's directed at children, the almost Tarantino-level slinging around of the n-word makes it a hot mess.

Key and Peele's first star vehicle is less "visionary" than shrewd, designed with a clear understanding of two things: 1) action-comedies seem to be popular, and 2) action-comedies are a little bit stupid... The film reconfirms what anyone who's watched Key & Peele already knows—that they have fine-tuned their almost symbiotic double-act into an elite level of precision—and via cinematography that, for the most part, looks like it might've blown up from a television or laptop screen.

It's funny at first. Then it isn't. And then, somehow, it's funny again. The pleasures of Keanu are different from those of the sketch routines. Key and Peele, hilarious as they are, are subtle performers, not raucous ones. And at certain points, the movie temporarily loses steam... But once you settle into Keanu, it works. And in many ways, it's of a piece with everything else Key and Peele have done.

It doesn't have nearly enough story to go the distance, sputtering through an '80s-style action-comedy that follows a feline MacGuffin through an L.A. gangland misadventure. And yet Key and Peele have such a sensationally giddy chemistry together that the film's raggedness plays, in their hands, like a kind of spontaneity.

A 10-minute sketch that's been inflated to bloated feature length. Running 90 minutes too long, the movie is a slack, erratically amusing excuse to watch Mr. Key and Mr. Peele tag-team after ending "Key & Peele," their celebrated, often blazingly funny Comedy Central series that turned them into national memes. The road to Mr. Key and Mr. Peele's future as movie headliners, though, will take more than kittens, guns and a riff on gangbangers head-bobbing to George Michael.

The physical spectacle of their subterfuge gives Key and Peele plenty of opportunity to showcase their chops. (The look on Key's face after Clarence attempts to flip backward against a wall is indelible.) But the social implications of their charade never delve beyond skin-deep.

Keanu himself all but vanishes, and there are only so many laughs that Key and Peele can wring from the spectacle of two nerds desperately, clumsily trying to be gangsta. Various gags, like Clarence's love for George Michael's "Father Figure," get repeated until all comedy has been leeched from them, and the movie as a whole feels about twice as long as it actually is. Some terrific comedians simply belong on television, working in shorter, punchier formats. There's no shame in that.

Like a greatest hits compilation that runs out of steam, this jovial buddy comedy formula (co-written by its stars) returns to variations of the same punchlines again and again. Wildly entertaining in parts, "Keanu" overstays its welcome and just keeps going, showing the growing pains of sketch comedy drawn out to epic proportions. Fortunately, as far as that formula goes, the "Key & Peele" team comes equipped with a built-in chemistry and keen satiric focus.

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.