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.
