“Sorry about that”: the movie Keanu Reeves compared to a “long, horrible story of pain and woe”
At this stage in his career, Keanu Reeves is pretty much bulletproof, and no amount of critical disasters or commercial catastrophes will ever be able to dent his unwavering star power.
Which is just as well, because there’s been a lot of them over the years, and if you eliminate the John Wick franchise and voice-only roles in Toy Story 4 and Sonic the Hedgehog from the equation, hit movies that win favour with critics have been few and far between for a long time.
The actor referred to The Day the Earth Stood Still as The Day My Career Stood Still, but when you consider The Matrix Resurrections, Replicas, Destination Wedding, Siberia, The Bad Batch, The Whole Truth, The Neon Demon, and Exposed falling short in one way or another in the last decade alone, it hasn’t exactly been nonstop forward momentum, either.
Fortunately, since he’s Keanu Reeves and everyone loves him, he’ll never be out of fashion, and if that ever does run the risk of happening, he can always make another John Wick and everything will be rosy. No matter what happens, though, the darkest hour of his entire career will never be usurped.
Director Joe Charbanic’s serial killer thriller The Watcher is, for want of a better term, shite. It’s one of the worst movies that Reeves has ever appeared in, but if there’s any shimmer of a silver lining, it’s that it technically wasn’t his fault, since he claims he never agreed to be in the film in the first place.
The star alleged that the director had forged his name on the contract, and because he wasn’t interested in getting caught up in a long-running legal battle, he went ahead with the picture, only to find himself even more annoyed when he was bumped up to a leading role despite working for scale instead of his typical multi-million-dollar salary.
Reflecting on the unfortunate outcome, Reeves said as much as he was allowed to say, having agreed in return for increased financial compensation that he wouldn’t talk about The Watcher for a year after its September 2000 release. Still, he was able to call it “a long, horrible story of pain and woe, and of deception and deceit!”
“I haven’t seen the picture, so I don’t know,” he said at the time, remaining oblivious to the fact that it was crap, but still apologising in classic Keanu fashion. “But I read the script, and yech! Sorry about that. But I got to work with some great actors. James Spader and Marisa Tomei, that was a great part of the experience, but I don’t think I’m legally allowed to talk about it.”
He’d said all he needed to, and when the embargo was finally lifted, and he could say what he wanted about The Watcher, he said the same thing: it was a nightmare, he didn’t want to do it, his hand was forced, and it was a sorry excuse for a movie that left a permanent black mark on his filmography.
