Word: keanu
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...Keanu Reeves co-stars with Pacino as Kevin Lomax, a cocky, hot-shot young lawyer--is there any other kind in Hollywood movies?--from Gainesville, Florida who has never lost a trial. After winning his umpteenth case, in which he defends a teacher accused of child molestation (and during which one of the teacher's victims, played to mock Southern perfection by Heather Matarazzo from Welcome to the Dollhouse, breaks into tears) he is approached by a representative from a New York law firm...
Hackford offers some dazzling visuals, including an artificial lake on top of a skyscraper and a chilling shot of Keanu Reeves walking out of a hospital to find all of Manhattan empty. Milton's penthouse exudes an atmosphere of slick, menacing, kinky-campy decadence--it's Hugh Hefner meets the Marquis de Sade. Hackford is smart enough not to let the cinematography get in the way of Pacino: as Milton, the actor is his own special effect. And when the actual special effects--including a wall sculpture that comes to swarming, slithery life--do appear, they pale in comparison...
...winsome in the Ur-Speed is missing here. This time she exists mainly to get tied up and abducted by Willem Dafoe, an actor who can never quite transcend (or enjoy) his inherent weirdness the way Dennis Hopper does. Jason Patric and his rippling pecs fill in for willowy Keanu Reeves as Annie's protector (and, in this case, lover). He's stalwart and athletic, but fundamentally uninteresting...
Depp turned down the Keanu Reeves part in Speed and the Brad Pitt role in Legends of the Fall, becoming something rather old-fashioned, a character lead. But he worked in the kind of films--youth-oriented and fringy--that middlebrow traditionalists, the people who sniffishly deplore actors who "just play themselves," never go to see. This is their loss; they have missed out on the filmography of the most interesting actor...
...figure: today, when elocution is a nearly lost art and Broadway has faded into the Great White Where?, lots of big-time stars are doing theater. Serious stuff, like Shakespeare and Beckett. Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Keanu Reeves have all paid obeisance to the old muse. Like doing an arty low-budget film, a stab at the classics can be a rite of purification after all those grimy blockbusters...