Keanu Keanu Keanu Keanu every voice saying Keanu
dir: Jonah Hill
2026
I didn’t think I’d ever watch and review a movie directed by Jonah Hill, but then I also never imagined I’d live in a world where one dissipated American orang-utan would hold the entire world to ransom.
And yet here we all are. The other main reason I never thought I’d watch something with Jonah Hill in it and / or directed by him is that I tired of his bullshit a long time ago. The last time I recall seeing him onscreen would have been when he was doing his Don Jnr routine in Don’t Look Up as the shitty son of Meryl Streep’s MAGA inflected president, and I think we were all like “that’s plenty, thanks.”
Around the same time there was a curious Netflix series where Hill stretched out these strange on camera recordings with his therapist, which, on the surface seemed like a recognisable Hollywood person talking openly and honestly about their struggles with mental health issues, encouraging others, especially men, to decrease the stigma around these issues and to seek the help and support they need.
And then an ex-girlfriend posted texts from Hill on social media to show how this manipulative and abusive piece of shit used therapy-speak and empty mental health phrases to berate and coercively control his former partner. Not so much ‘cancelled’, which isn’t really a thing, he showed that he still had some capacity for shame and scurried away to “work” on himself, presumably.
Years pass. Time passes. And here we are. Hill enlists Keanu Reeves, a much beloved figure praised by all and sundry, but not known for the quality of his acting, really, to play a Jonah Hill-like figure who’s terrified of the current social media hellscape and its capacity to destroy innocent men’s careers.
In the film itself Keanu plays Reef, one of the most successful and lauded actors on the planet. He’s not only in the biggest film franchises, he’s also highly respected, which means he’s won all the awards and critics swoon over him. The great source of his shame is that he has been struggling against his heroin addiction for years, unbeknownst to the public, and now that he’s beaten it, he’s ready to work again.
But hark! Someone threatens the potential relaunch of his career, with some alleged recording of Reef doing something terrible that could go public and destroy Reef’s beloved public image.
Thus, upon waking each morning, Reef desperately scours google, the tabloid sites, the reddits and sub-reddits for any mention of him doing something terrible to someone, at some point in time.
He’s really very stressed. So stressed, that he may even go back to his sweet old mistress heroin if the stress doesn’t subside.
Isn’t it terrible, someone as noble and wholesome as Reef / Keanu having to stress about repercussions and consequences? I mean, he’s brought so much joy to so many people: he shouldn’t have to walk around like he’s got a target on his back, should he?
You may read all that nonsense and think to yourself, “okay but what’s that got to do with cancel culture and Jonah Hill feeling like he was ostracised by high society?” Well, what indeed.
I would argue that we, the humble audience, mostly made up of people whose lives aren’t upended because of stuff that happens online, would watch something like this and think “well, Jonah Hill is a famous person who’s been in many movies; he must feel like life lived under the scrutiny of the media and especially social media is hellish and unnatural, and no way for a human being to live.”
Cancel culture itself means different things to different people. To some people, like the kinds of weirdos who don’t get paid for it but still feel the need to spruik for billionaires and celebrities, cancel culture is the totally unfair thing that happens when people try to punish you for completely innocent things you did, like having sex with underage children or coercing / nagging other people into sex with threats of violence or loss of employment. And so these people get ‘cancelled’ for a while, in that people are usually reluctant to engage them or employ them, because they’re pieces of shit, and then they wait a while until things blow over and then act like nothing happened or like they did penance or something.
To others, ‘cancel culture’ is a bullshit thing that doesn’t really exist, which pays token lip service to people facing consequences for their actions, but which doesn’t actually result in any loss or punishment to the perpetrators for having done or said any of the things they did or said. Louis CK won awards after he was allegedly cancelled, paid millions for more shows, and suffered no repercussions that I can detect. When Dave Chappelle decided his stand up career would be nothing but anti-trans jokes and sucking up to the Saudi regime, he not only lost not a single cent of potential pay, he’s earned more money than he ever had before he decided to punch down on the most marginalised minority in the world and take money from a murderous monarchy.
People, mostly morons, still think it’s generally unfair when celebrities, important people, better than the rest of us lowly scum, are criticised for doing anything, whether it’s right or wrong, and so Jonah Hill is here to teach us the error of our ways.
Reef fears that he’s done something terrible, and someone is going to punish him for it. Turns out he didn’t do something terrible (just captured doing something that would be publicly embarrassing unless you’re a president, in which case they’d vote for you double), he’s just terrified that he’ll be punished despite being ‘innocent’ of actual wrongdoing. And so at the behest of his odious lawyer (of course played by Jonah Hill) and with the help of his high school best friends and only friends (Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer), Reef tries to apologise to a range of people from his past in the hopes that he might forestall their wrath and their blackmail attempts.
I don’t know how a guy in his 60s was best friends with someone who’s still in her 50s and a guy in his late 40s at high school, but this must be some form of that Hollywood magic at play.
So he apologises to his first manager from when he was a kid (Martin Scorsese, who probably somehow puts in the best performance in the whole flick), and his mother, who swears a lot but also only agrees to the reconciliation if it can be filmed for her reality tv show.
There are others who he fears he’s wronged, but this character, like Keanu himself, is mostly treated as a fucking saint, so we know it’s none of these people. An ex he had has not only moved on, but thrived, found love, created a family, all things he’s apparently never going to achieve. I started to suspect that maybe it was his besties fucking with him with the blackmail threat, and even though that’s not how it plays out (it’s way more pathetic than that), they are after something from him.
An apology. That’s all they want. An apology for having taken them for granted and for all the shit they had to put up with in the depths of his addiction.
That’s understandable. That’s human. That’s why it feels so out of place in this strange film concocted by a jerk with a grudge on the media and on society in general. We hurt Jonah Hill’s feelings, and he didn’t do anything to deserve it, so he subjected us to a film where Keanu stands in for him, and puts him through the ringer so that we can feel bad about what we did to him.
That sounds fair. That checks out.
I can’t really judge this flick with the criteria that I use for other movies, because… it wouldn’t be fair to the people involved. I feel like I’m grading a child’s school assignment, on the most generous of curves.
Even if it was made for Apple TV, this has actors in it doing actorly things, so it’s meant to be taken seriously, but for all that Keanu has become this beloved public figure, it’s not because his acting skills have improved over all these years. His success in the John Wick franchise is because he kills thousands of people in artful ways, well, something close to art, and the dialogue and acting are kept to the absolute bare minimum. I can’t think of an instance in any of those 5 films where he ever said more than a sentence at a time. The pinnacle of his dialogue was probably “I’m going to kill them all.”
Well of course you did, John / Keanu. Of course you did.
He’s still the guy he was in Johnnie Mnemonic and Coppolla’s Dracula and the Southern jerk from Devil’s Advocate, he’s just older and wiser now.
God damn me for being a hater, he is still such a poor actor, but I’ll be doubly damned if I don’t still like him anyway. I found myself inexplicably and involuntarily moved by his character in this silly, silly film that doesn’t deserve our time, affection or forgiveness. I still somehow still enjoyed this strange escapade (though not any time Jonah Hill was onscreen), and will do so the next time Keanu appears in anything.
That’s how this parasocial thing works, don’t you know? By being eternally forgiving / forgetful / always needing more.
6 times I hope I’m never blackmailed like that, but then I’m reasonably sure / somewhat sure / desperately hopeful that I’ve never done anything that bad out of 10
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“What even is an apology, Reef? Is it for you, is it for me?” – important questions being asked onscreen - Outcome
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