Key & Peele, the show, may have concluded its brilliant run last year (bummer), but Key & Peele the comedic duo is not yet dead (nooice!). The trailer for their first outing on the big screen, Keanu, is here, and it’s just about as ridiculous as you’d expect. After his girlfriend breaks up with him, Rell (Jordan Peele) is an absolute wreck—until an adorable little kitten shows up on his doorstep. He names said kitten Keanu, but it’s not long before his house is robbed and Keanu is gone, snatched by some drug dealers, including a kingpin played by Method Man. Together, Rell and his buddy Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) must pretend to be gangstas in order to steal Keanu back.
The jokes we see so far are half jokes about contemporary black masculinity (e.g. Clarence jams to George Michael’s “Freedom”) and half kitten jokes, in which Keanu dodges, slides, and jumps in slo-mo in the way only action heroes do. Which is to say that Keanu probably isn’t a huge departure from the sort of wacky yet smart Key & Peele we came to know and love. Whether or not their humor can sustain a feature-length film in the way that it worked in concise four-minute bits remains to be seen, but the comedians are working with longtime Key & Peele director Peter Atencio and longtime Key & Peele writer Alex Rubens, so hopefully they’ll be able to recreate some of the old magic. We’ll find out when Keanu hits theaters on April 22.
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