The terrible movie Keanu Reeves regrets making: “What happened to that script?”
Keanu Reeves has always been a star who has garnered as much love as he has criticism. Asserting himself as an action star in the 1990s, he impressed with roles in movies like The Matrix, one of the biggest movies of the decade, while also appearing in some all-out stinkers.
Reeves rose to prominence with the lighthearted Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, before rising even further in 1991 with the release of three films – Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, Point Break, and My Own Private Idaho. The latter, appearing alongside River Phoenix, saw him deliver a moving performance that helped to assert him as an impressive star, although the following year he found himself on the receiving end of lots of negativity for his role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
It seems as though Reeves has never been able to truly assert himself as one of the all-time greats of his generation due to various bad performances that have tarnished his reputation. Then there’s the genuinely awful movies he has chosen to star in that make you wonder what he was thinking when he picked them. From Even Cowgirls Get the Blues to Johnny Mnemonic, Reeves has chosen some questionable roles that have landed him in critical purgatory, but in some cases, he has a defense.
Take Chain Reaction for example. Starring alongside Morgan Freeman and Rachel Weisz, Reeves appeared as a machinist who goes on the run after he is accused of murder, but the reviews were poor. We’re not saying the movie had much potential in the first place, but to be fair to Reeves, the movie really wasn’t anything like the script that he initially read and signed up for.
Talking to UPI, he revealed that he picks movies based on the “story and how I feel about the character,” although that resulted in the disaster that was Chain Reaction. He continued, “I felt like that for Chain Reaction, but when I got there, it was a different movie.”
He explained, “Originally, I was married. I had this kid, and I did this research, and I didn’t know that what I was researching had this effect. And someone got killed, and I had these regrets, and I’m trying to stop what I’m doing, but they can’t let me, so they’re chasing me.”
Yet, once he was on board with the production, he found it was nothing like what he thought it would be. “And then all of a sudden I turn into this 24-year-old machinist and I turned to [director] Andrew Davis and I said, ‘What happened to the movie I said yes to? What happened to that script? Where did that go?’ And he said, ‘No, I got something better,’ and so I just had to go with it.”
The film earned Reeves a Razzie nomination for ‘Worst Actor’– one of many he has earned from the Golden Raspberry Awards over the years. Evidently, Chain Reaction wasn’t Reeves’ finest hour, coming at a time when he was consistently starring in far from illustrious productions, like Johnny Mnemonic, A Walk in the Clouds, and Feeling Minnesota.
