The resurrection of Keanu Reeves post-John Wick was so swift and thunderous that it’s become actively difficult to imagine a time when he wasn’t in the Hall of Fame of Badass Action Icons. This isn’t to claim we can only see him as a killing machine, as he’s clearly proven his deceptive range in the past decade, being surprisingly convincing as both a Canadian daredevil toy and as a pretentious parody of himself. Reeves’ current persona is such a convincing about-face that it’s made us forget the past times he’s played killers, albeit less successful ones. The best instance of this was in I Love You to Death, Lawrence Kasdan‘s largely forgotten farce in which Reeves plays a burnout loser who spectacularly sucks at being a killer-for-hire in one of the funniest performances of his career.
What Is ‘I Love You to Death’ About?
In I Love You to Death, Joey Boca (Kevin Kline) just can’t stop cheating, tossing new women into bed as swiftly as he tosses pizza pies into the air at his successful pizza parlor. He’s so brazen in his constant pursuits that he’s lucky his wife, Rosalie (Tracey Ullman), has only now caught him redhanded, unbeknownst to him. In her righteous fury, she refuses to get a divorce, instead opting to conspire with her mother, Nadja (Joan Plowright), to have him killed. She turns to Devo (River Phoenix), the busboy of Joey’s business who is obviously in love with Rosalie, to kill Joey, but he’s too chicken to do it. So he turns to two buffoon burnouts he happens to know from the local bar, cousins named Harlan (William Hurt) and Marlon (Keanu Reeves). The film largely attempts to be a dark comedy in the vein of the Coen Brothers, and it really soars with the late entrance of Harlan and Marlon, blossoming as the most fully realized characters of the bunch.
Harlan and Marlon are like the Three Stooges if the third one went missing, sharing a combined four brain cells, with Harlan having three of them. While Harlan is seemingly the brains of the operation, more verbose and twitchy with possibly paranoid delusions, Marlon is a zombie with a cow’s stare and the worst haircut I’ve ever seen. Constantly lost in a daze of undetermined drugs, there’s a good chance they don’t even fully know they’re signing up to kill someone, even as they’re holding weapons and standing over Joey’s body. While Hurt arguably has more to do as Harlan, with his nervous outbursts and exasperated demeanor, Reeves is hilarious with how much he draws out Marlon’s every action and reaction. He makes you wait around, thinking that he’ll do something surprising or profound, only to mic drop the dullest response you could possibly imagine, and it’s that see-saw of their rhythms that makes the pair so funny.
Keanu Reeves Is Hilarious as a Distracted Fool in ‘I Love You to Death’
From his introduction, Marlon is barely functioning as a member of society. When Devo enters a bar to see Harlan slumped over the pool table and asks where Marlon is, Marlon’s arm shoots up from under the table, holding the cue ball. Haggard with red-rimmed eyes like a rabid raccoon, he lumbers himself off the ground with the balance of a Looney Tunes character that got hit on the head with a mallet, and slips his monotone words out at a quarter speed. To watch Marlon grind every essential interaction down to a one-syllable word after seeming to mull an answer over for an ungodly amount of time is to watch gummed up gears grind so hard that they explode. Reeves may have gotten famous for playing one of cinema’s greatest airheads in the Bill & Ted films, but Ted at least had a Zen wisdom about how to treat others and a healthy lack of ego, while Marlon can barely bother to remember he has an ego at all. Marlon is funny not simply because he’s so dumb, but because he’s clearly putting forth so much effort to think his way through the foggy knots of his mind, only to still wind up lost. He just goes where Harlan takes him, content at the chump change Devo gives them to murder someone he doesn’t even know.
That willingness to go with the flow becomes both an asset and a hindrance in his new venture as a killer, as Marlon’s inability to stay on the ball nearly derails their one chance at Joey. As they stand over his unconscious body, with Harlan brandishing a pathetic revolver and Marlon holding a baseball bat, Harlan notices that New York Yankees legend Reggie Jackson‘s signature is on the bat. Rather than ignoring this as an unnecessary aside, Marlon drags it out, trying to recall how many homeruns Reggie had in his career and leading Harlan into a made-up chant about Reggie. Many of the boys’ funniest moments come from a hang-dog looseness that feels like Reeves and Hurt are coasting on their chemistry, with a sprinkle of the kind of meandering diatribes among ordinary criminals a few years before Quentin Tarantino would make that his trademark with Reservoir Dogs. Combine that with the way Marlon anxiously lumbers around all lock-kneed and shoulders swinging, it’s a flash of the clownery that Reeves has rarely tapped into for the majority of his career, making you wish that he’d done more straight-up comedies.
Another treat in this film is seeing Reeves be paired up with his real-life best friend, River Phoenix, for the first time, a full year before their iconic collaboration in My Own Private Idaho. Devo and Marlon rarely interact directly, since Harlan does more talking, but the two still share a chuckle-worthy awkward dynamic where Devo will try to reason with Marlon, to no avail. Reeves’ scummy and cynical mellowness clashes well with Phoenix’s naïve and childish angst, creating a comedy of errors where no amount of attempted communication can salvage a poorly conceived business connection. Devo is largely baffled by Marlon’s existence, and Marlon presumably forgets Devo even exists as soon as he’s out of sight, perhaps for the better. Similar to Reeves, Phoenix was an actor who didn’t do much comedy in his brilliant yet short career, and the pair benefit immensely from their real-life chemistry, as it translates to how well they play against each other in character.
Keanu Reeves Can Be Funny When Taken Seriously
Keanu Reeves is an actor not usually easily accustomed to comedy, as everything about him suggests a gravitas that hearkens back to the days of silent cinema. He might get clowned on for his line deliveries, but his tone of voice and his unadorned emotionality speak to an earnestness that can be well utilized for comedy. Comedy, after all, works best when the performers treat it like it’s a drama, and Reeves is near incapable of making what he says sound anything less than extremely important. When looking at the times when he succeeded in comedy (most notably Toy Story 4 and Always Be My Maybe), it was by playing characters that were not only completely absorbed in their own worldviews to the detriment of others, but also slight inversions in how we perceived Reeves as a public figure.
In the case of I Love You to Death, he takes an unlikable wannabe goon and makes him humorously good company by infusing him with that infamous “California surfer” energy that first made him such a unique screen presence. He might be a human barnacle who spends all his time getting drunk at bars, but that extra pause in his voice belies a pitiful attempt at thoughtfulness that’s foiled by his notable intelligence limitations (not to mention the mountain of drugs he’s definitely doing). That hints at an existential tragedy that is actually quite fitting, and makes his idiotic tomfoolery just a bit sad, and therefore hilarious.
