Oh, Keanu. How you are mocked, disdained, imitated! (Can you walk into a supermarket without someone snickering "Whoa!" from the cereal aisle as you pass? I suspect not.) How your artistic ambitions are derided! Despite your success, you have not had an easy go of things, my friend. Just once, I wish you could use an ATM without the person behind you making a crack about hacking into the Matrix!

But I'll stand by you, dude. Don't ask me to do the impossible—I cannot claim you're an excellent actor, and I cannot—will not—defend Johnny Mnemonic. But will I stand by your work in The Matrix? Yes! Will I applaud A Scanner Darkly? Indeed! Will I vouch for your part in Much Ado About Nothing? Sign me up!

But you don't make it easy, man. For though I thrilled to the excellent and bogus trials of the Wyld Stallyns, and while I can handily recite your dialogue from Point Break, I have wiped my memory of that time you teamed up with Morgan Freeman to stop a lethal chain reaction in, uh, Chain Reaction, or that time you pretended to be Siddhartha in Little Buddha. Here's my hunch: You work really well in movies where you're not the focus. I know that sounds like a dis, but wait: When you're the restrained, borderline-boring anchor of films that're otherwise overstuffed with wacky CG or heady philosophy (The Matrix, Constantine, A Scanner Darkly), you're imminently watchable and totally likeable! Okay, that still kind of sounds like a dis, but I mean it in a good way.

Think about it: Everyone makes fun of you, but everyone has also seen everything you've ever been in. Sometimes you're mocked (The Devil's Advocate) and sometimes you're not (My Own Private Idaho), but overall? You're doing something right, man! Don't listen to that ATM jerk! Some of us appreciate you! And besides: There's nobody else I'd rather be stuck on a bus with, provided that bus had a bomb on board that had been placed there by a maniacal Dennis Hopper who had rigged it so the bus couldn't drive under 50 miles per hour.