The “trash” movies that made Keanu Reeves “feel like throttling someone” and how that made him a hypocrite
When you’ve spent as long in Hollywood as Keanu Reeves has, it was almost inevitable that something he said in the past would come back to haunt him further down the line. Funnily enough, it did.
For the most part, the actor has lived up to his long-held reputation as one of the most authentic, kind, and warm-hearted fellas in the business. He’s Keanu Reeves, the most wholesome man in Tinseltown, so it’s not as if he’s been one of those stars plagued by having old dirty laundry re-aired to catch him out.
On the other hand, he was nonetheless guilty of committing the very same sins that he’d previously and very vocally railed against, even if there’s a smidgen of irony in his tongue-lashing coming on the set of a movie that he felt he’d been hoodwinked into making, which turned into something he didn’t want it to be.
In short, 1996’s Chain Reaction is rubbish. It flopped at the box office, it was flushed down the toilet by critics, and it was well beyond saving. It also wasn’t the film that Reeves wanted to make, with the original script he’d read and signed on for having been butchered into something unrecognisable by the time he arrived on set.
“The truth is, I didn’t think it was going to be a big action movie,” he acknowledged at the time. “I had script consultation, but not approval, and I signed early on. But it went in a direction I wasn’t expecting.” He was expecting something with more drama, which was nowhere to be found, but he still believed the cast and crew had “concentrated on making a very realistic picture, and not letting the special effects be the most important aspect, like so many other movies.”
Anyone who’s seen Chain Reaction knows that isn’t true, with the effects one of the only half-decent and remotely memorable things about it, which is where the irony came in. “Some movies go so over the top with special effects,” the actor added. “I feel like throttling someone when I see that trash.”
Stone, meet glass house. We’ll give The Matrix a pass because, as effects-heavy as it was, it was all in service of the story. Reloaded, Revolutions, and Resurrections, though? In an attempt to replicate the awe-inspiring and cutting-edge CGI of the original, the Wachowskis piled in and turned much of the following three instalments into a pixelated soup, with the narrative suffering as a result.
The Day the Earth Stood Still? Another dud drowning in digital wizardry, and one that did a stellar job of almost derailing Reeves’ position as a studio leading man. Then there’s the abominable 47 Ronin, which went all-in on the CGI and ended its run in cinemas as one of the biggest box office bombs of all time.
Movies with over-the-top special effects may have made Reeves want to throttle someone in the mid-90s, but he became complicit in the very thing he despised, and several times over, no less. On the plus side, at least he avoided Speed 2.
