| Actor, Point Break (1991) |
| You've got to love any suspense movie that asks us to buy Keanu Reeves, player par excellence of clueless dudes, as Johnny Utah, a football supernova whose career was detoured by a busted knee. Considering that Reeves suggests a guy who scored too many tackles without a helmet, that's already pushing it, but Reeves's character is also supposed to have won a law degree and graduated at the top of his class. |
| (Edward Margulies & Stephen Rebello, Bad Movies We Love) |
| Actor, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) |
| Keanu Reeves seems to have wandered in from the set of Bill and Ted's Transylvanian Adventure, his face registering a perpetually glazed look of befuddlement. This Jonathan Harker looks like he'd probably be more at home in Malibu than Victorian England. |
| (Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle) |
| While [Gary] Oldman, [Anthony] Hopkins and [Tom] Waits vie to see who can go farthest over the top, Reeves is stiff as a board (and very uncomfortable with his affected English accent). |
| (Chris Hicks, Deseret News) |
| Dreadful performances from Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, and the shrill Sadie Frost further betray our interest and patience. |
| (Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central) |
| Reeves behaves like a quite nice high-school boy in the senior class production of Dracula. Ryder matches him perfectly. |
| (Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic) |
| I know there is a storyline buried somewhere in all the violence and weirdness, but God only knows where. And even if you can take all the gore, you still have to contend with surfer dude Keanu Reeves' British accent. |
| (Rod Lurie, Los Angeles Magazine) |
| Actor, Much Ado About Nothing (1993) |
| Keanu Reeves, as Don Pedro's bastard brother, Don John, isn't as bad as one might reasonably expect (given his lackluster track record), principally because he doesn't have many lines. |
| (James Berardinelli, Reelviews) |
| The picture is overripe, and with few exceptions, so are the performances. Keaton seems to be making up for his admirable restraint in the two Batman films. As for Reeves, such lines as “Come, come let us thither” do not fall trippingly off this surfer dude's tongue. |
| (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone) |
| Branagh's attempt to broaden the movie's audience by casting American actors Denzel Washington, Michael Keaton, Keanu Reeves and Robert Sean Leonard is a bust. Except for Reeves, they aren't embarrassingly bad, but they simply don't seem as comfortable with the Bard as the British thespians. |
| (Stephen Farber, Movieline.com) |
| As Don John, Don Pedro's other half brother (and archenemy), Keanu Reeves is a surly brat with a chip on his shoulder. Reeves plays him as if his face were frozen into a perpetual sulk. |
| (Hal Hinson, Washington Post) |
| Actor, Johnny Mnemonic (1995) |
| Keanu Reeves, an actor of exceptionally limited scope, plays the title character with about as much wattage as a pen flashlight. Reeves alternates between understated and over-the-top with alarming regularity, creating several unintentionally hilarious moments. As evidence of how poor this performance is, consider that Dolph Lundgren, as a bionic villain, acts circles around Reeves. That's right, I said Dolph Lundgren. The main problem is the script, which is as dumb as action stories get. Just because a film takes place in a futuristic setting doesn't mean that all logic and coherence have to go out the window. Above all, why should we care whether Johnny's head explodes when Reeves' performance fails to spark any empathy for his character? Johnny Mnemonic is brash, flashy, and loud, but it lacks a few key ingredients - namely heart, soul, and intelligence. |
| (James Berardinelli, Reelviews) |
| Even if Reeves could act, his character as written would be flatter than a floppy disk. |
| (Rita Kempley, Washington Post) |
| No one I have known has actually ever accused Keanu Reeves of being able to act. This film will change no one's mind. |
| (Ben Hoffman) |
| Offers the embarrassing spectacle of Keanu Reeves working overtime to convince you that he has too much on his mind. He doesn't, and neither does the movie. |
| (Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly) |
| Casting Keanu Reeves as a blank slate seems almost too perfect. Even when Reeves is playing characters in full possession of their faculties, there is always something oddly vacant about his delivery, as if his words were being filtered through a kind of artificial intelligence. |
| (Brian D.Johnson, Maclean's) |
| As played by Reeves (not the most expressive actor to begin with), Johnny may as well be the walking dead. No dialogue is really necessary, just a few motor skills and the rest of the story will surely follow. And when you are being upstaged by the likes of Ice-T, Henry Rollins, Udo Kier, and god help us, Dolph Lundgren, you know you are in trouble. |
| (Ned Daigle, Bad Movie Night) |
| Of course one of the film's biggest flaws is in the central casting of Reeves as a desperate hero; this is at the opposite end of the movie quality spectrum from The Matrix and about a tenth as entertaining. Reeves is wooden, wooden, wooden and quite pathetic at times. |
| (The Grim Reaper's Movie Guide) |
| Actor, A Walk in the Clouds (1995) |
| The most fun to be had with the film is in watching Reeves struggle through his dialogue - that and attempting to figure out what in heaven's name Anthony Quinn, who plays Victoria's sagacious grandfather, is trying to do. With his hands fluttering wildly around his face like a belly dancer's, Quinn looks at times as if he were actually trying to achieve liftoff. |
| (Hal Hinson, Washington Post) |
| Describing his experiences in World War II to his new acquaintance Victoria Aragon (Sanchez-Gijon), Paul Sutton (Reeves) declares, “Once the shooting starts, you just go blank.” Never have I heard a more fitting description of Reeves’ acting. How this overrated and monotonal actor could have been cast in director Arau's Hollywood debut is beyond me. |
| (Alison Macor, Austin Chronicle) |
| Pure yucky mush. And Keanu can't act. |
| (Audrey Rock-Richardson, Tooele Transcript-Bulletin) |
| Remarkably, what saves it is Reeves' laughably monotonous performance - just the weird element the picture needs to keep its innocence interesting. |
| (Zachary Woodruff, Tucson Weekly) |
| The big studio misstep is that Hollywood pinup Keanu Reeves plays the soldier. Keanu Reeves! Why? Because he knows about buses? With his stiff body language and wooden delivery, his every word falls like drops of flat Diet Coke rather than intoxicating wine. |
| (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly) |
| Then there's Keanu. Well… he tries. He's just too stiff to be taken seriously. |
| (Michael J. Legeros, Movie Hell) |
| Reeves is not the kind of actor the film needed to rise above the level of simple sentimentality. He brings to his role of disillusioned doughboy his signature in-your-face sincerity, but he needs to ooze the charisma Quinn and Giannini have so much of, or the pent-up passion portrayed by the lovely Sanchez-Gijon, to fill out a character who's supposed to seethe with internal conflict and passion. |
| (Jon Silberg, Box Office) |
| Actor, The Devil's Advocate (1997) |
| The good news about Reeves is that, although he is still predictably bad and horribly miscast, he is not intolerable, owing much to the riveting performances of his co-stars. |
| (Wade Major, Box Office) |
| Reeves still can't act, and is not at all believable as a slick young lawyer - and especially not as a slick Southern lawyer (he never masters the accent). Let's not talk about him. |
| (Curtis Edmonds, TXReviews) |
| A fixed fight: putting Keanu Reeves up against Al Pacino is a bit like throwing wood on to a fire to see if it burns. |
| (Tom Shone, Sunday Times) |
| Actor, The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1998) |
| Fans beware - Reeves's face is puffy, he has a second chin and he's no longer the heroic figure of his hunky heyday. |
| (Alan Frank, Video Home Entertainment) |
| Actor, The Matrix (1999) |
| Keanu wears the same expression whether he's being Thomas or Neo, which is exactly the same one he used in Johnny Mnemonic, where he acted as though he had misheard the title and was trying to be Jolly Moronic. When he's not delivering lines and is supposed to be reacting, his face freezes, like a computer screen that's crashed because you're trying to enter too much data at once. Then someone must reboot him or something, because he talks, albeit slowly as though he is being operated by very primitive speech-recognition software. The amazing truth which gradually dawns about Keanu over the course of the movie is that HE ISN'T SUPPOSED TO BE PLAYING A FAULTY PIECE OF MACHINERY. He's meant to be not only a real person, but a brilliant computer criminal and The One Who Is Going To Save The World. He struck me as the least likely Messiah since Olivia Newton-John saved humanity in one of 1983's worst turkeys, Two of a Kind. Still, his fans may differ. |
| (Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
| Actor, Sweet November (2001) |
| What keeps it (barely) from being completely intolerable is Keanu Reeves' hilariously awful lead performance. |
| (Kevin Maynard, Mr. Showbiz) |
| Reeves gives the worst performance in Sweet November, and he's the best thing about it. |
| (M.V. Moorhead, New Times) |
| The utter absence of chemistry between Reeves and Theron is just the last nail in this colossal misfire's coffin. |
| (Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide’s Movie Guide) |
| I hate to beat a dead horse here, but Keanu Reeves can't act. |
| (Eric D. Snider, Land of Eric) |
| What may be the worst performance yet by Keanu Reeves. |
| (Steve Schneider, Orlando Weekly) |
| Keanu looks and sounds more robotic than ever: like Michael Portillo on Mogadon. |
| (Peter Bradshaw, Guardian) |
| It contains yet another bewilderingly flat performance by Keanu Reeves. As a workaholic advertising executive with no time for relationships or any of that sissy stuff, he gives a performance of the purest mahogany. His idea of being mean, moody and macho is to lower his voice to a depressing drone. You keep expecting him to break into a rendition of I Was Born Under A Wanderin' Star. |
| (Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
| Actor, Hardball (2001) |
| In Hardball, he really, really tries to act - with lots of awkward, irrelevant hand signals, as though he is hoping some day to replace John McCririck on Channel 4 horse-racing. In the absence of any sporting excitement or character depth, the film ladles on the sentiment as one of the small boys is killed in a heavily foreshadowed drive-by shooting, and Keanu gets to deliver his funeral eulogy, complete with hand movements. This deeply felt speech was greeted at the national press screening with tears, I regret to say, of hilarity. Keanu Reeves trying to emote is like Big Ron Atkinson reciting Rilke, or a moose trying to compete in the finals of a world figure-skating championship. It is bizarre, surreal and somehow deeply uncalled for. |
| (Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
| Actor, The Matrix Reloaded (2003) |
| Keanu Reeves still can't act. When it comes to expressing emotion, he's right up there with Steven Seagal as one of the worst actors of all time. Fortunately, the role requires very little of him, except to look baffled, out of his depth but determined - and, of course, “cool”. In a world where intelligence, principle and moral qualities are regarded with deep suspicion, "Cool" has become the ultimate accolade. Keanu undoubtedly looks "cool" as he barely registers a flicker of emotion while slaughtering dozens of people without remorse. This is an intensely violent movie, and the aggression is both extreme and sanitised. We don't see the after-effects of violence - only the joy and excitement of committing it. I am far from convinced that this is a good thing. Indeed, there are ways in which Matrix Reloaded captures all too well the casual brutality and self-congratulatory superficiality of our times. |
| (Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
| Actor, The Matrix Revolutions (2003) |
| The stardust magic that The Matrix sprinkled around Keanu Reeves's carer is fading. Looking at his gormless, expressionless face I can once again hear two words echoing ever louder in my head: Johnny Mnemonic. |
| (Peter Bradshaw, Guardian) |
| Actor, Constantine (2005) |
| Keanu Reeves must be taking some kind of super-strength Botox to look like this. It is beyond anything as vulgar as bad acting. Those exotic chops are patently not in receipt of electrical impulses from the brain in the conventional manner. Maybe Keanu is shooting up Botox with the calibre of needle they use to subdue a rhinoceros; or maybe he is munching his bodyweight in Botox brownies in the location catering van or smoking rock after rock of a special kind of Botox crack. On screen, he runs; he jumps; he gestures dramatically at the heavens or at his co-star, and those features are set immovably, like an ovoid latex pudding. Perhaps he is in shock and it is all part of the act. |
| (Peter Bradshaw, Guardian) |
| The film’s pretensions are rendered even more ludicrous by Keanu’s lovingly detailed impersonation of a sleep-walking plank. |
| (Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
| Actor, A Scanner Darkly (2006) |
| Poor Keanu Reeves - with the central role of an undercover drugs-enforcement officer who finds himself investigating not only his friends but himself - seems even more confused and unintelligible than his character is supposed to be. Even if you do manage to sick it with it to the end (in which case you will be rewarded with a couple of neat plot-twists), you may well feel that an animated Keanu Reeves is quintessentially a contradiction in terms. |
| (Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
| Actor, Street Kings (2008) |
| You don’t know the meaning of the word “miscast” until you’ve seen Keanu Reeves playing a racist, corrupt, borderline-alcoholic cop in the LAPD. |
| (Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph) |
| Reeves is fundamentally blank and uninteresting. |
| (Peter Bradshaw, Guardian) |
| It’s hard to know whether Keanu Reeves has finally been replaced with an animatronic version of himself, been hit on the head by a massive tub of Botox, is under heavy sedation with horse tranquillisers, or has been persuaded to try to reinvigorate his career with a double eye transplant from a stuffed moose. Whatever the explanation, as a latterday Dirty Harry, he is even more facially inert than usual. |
| (Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
| Actor, The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008) |
| Reeves stars, giving the kind of tepid performance that lesser beings can only approximate by necking a hundredweight of Temazepam. |
| (Peter Bradshaw, Guardian) |
