The only Keanu Reeves movie disowned by its director: “Whic was really tough, and a tragedy”
Having made for bad movies than most A-listers during his 40-year career, it’s been a long time since Keanu Reeves gave a shit about what the critics think. He did have a valid excuse on one occasion, though, with a universally trashed thriller being completely disowned by its director.
As popular and beloved as he is, even the most ardent Reeves fans need their eyes checked if they don’t think he’s lent his name to some wretched fare. Replicas, Johnny Mnemonic, Siberia, 47 Ronin, and The Day the Earth Stood Still remake are all objectively bad films, with The Watcher getting a pass because he was hoodwinked into making it.
Obviously, the good outweighs the bad, with Point Break, Speed, The Matrix, and John Wick enshrining the actor as one of his generation’s biggest stars. In the nicest possibly way, tackling straightforward drama isn’t the best use of someone with Reeves’ limited performative skill set, but Exposed wasn’t helped by scissor-happy studio executives turning the film into something nobody wanted it to be.
Writer, director, and producer Gee Linton Dale made his feature-length directorial debut on the 2016 picture, which was intended to be a somewhat surrealist drama with a heavy focus on Spanish-language dialogue, digging into hard-hitting and resonant themes, like violence toward women, the abuse of power by people in positions of authority, and sexual abuse.
Instead, the version that was released was watered down and retrofitted as a standard procedural, following Reeves’ dogged detective as he seeks the truth about his partner’s death. Some aspects of Linton’s original vision remained, but they’d been so severely sanded down by the suits in the boardroom that he wanted nothing to do with the movie.
The credits listed Exposed as having been directed by Declan Dale, a pseudonym. Things were even more awkward when Reeves hit the publicity circuit to try and drum up buzz for a production plagued by tales of woe and bad blood, but he was smart and self-aware enough to realise the elephant in the room needed to be addressed head-on.
“Ultimately, it worked out really difficultly,” he told IGN. “The director ended up taking his name off the picture, which was really tough and a tragedy. And so the cut that’s showing of the movie is oriented much more towards, not really the suspense elements of it, but the studio’s kind of releasing it as this sort of cop thriller. And it’s definitely not that.”
Reeves called a spade a spade, and he didn’t really have a choice when it was common knowledge that Linton had distanced himself as far away from Exposed as possible. There was a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, though, with an alternate version of the movie, under its initial title of Daughter of God, appearing online to give viewers a much clearer indication of what the film was supposed to be.
It was swept under the rug and buried by everyone involved, but it did make history as the only entry in Reeves’ filmography that was disowned by the person who made it.
