"Keanu" R
Kay and Peele break off from their 2 season Comedy Central show, which was lorded as a rip off of Dave Chappelle since it started, and of the Internet Charlie Brown Kwanzaa parodies of Most Offensive Video, and many others. to make a movie.
The story starts out with a Boondock Saints meets The Boondocks cartoon like fight in a gangland town where thugs have a gunfight over drugs while a kitty, mostly a CGI motion capture animal, runs off into the darkness.
Presumably some time later, the striped kitty arrives in east LA, ala Cheech and Chong and Slackers, and is taken in by a downtrodden pot smoking slightly portly dude who is sad because his girlfriend left him.
His more hip friend is taller and bald, and looks like he could be Mr. Clean, and he assures his friend that things will get better. Even though his wife is apparently running off to hang out with his pasty white and obviously sleazy neighbor for the weekend, the smarter dressed man still claims to be smarter.
The two men become like stand ins for Chapelle and various others, but without the same charisma.
When the kitty is taken by a rival gang, the down dude wants to go full gangsta and rescue the little guy, leading to one of the more amusing scenes, as they go full Lethal Weapon meets Let's be Cops meets 21 Jump Street and pretend to be ganstas to get the kitty.
The drug kingpin though wants them to swear loyalty by doing a job, and training some of his dippy lackeys, but the smart bald dude is a minivan driving poser who loves George Michael songs, and his stoner friend is given the job of going on the run.
When a disastrous cameo gunfight occurs, involving a certain chick from Scary Movie, the film dips into that territory. This could have been called Action Movie.
Much of the jive talking lines are lifted from comedians who did it better before, such as Dolemite, Moody and Pryor and Murphy, even Chapelle, and the Film Threat dudes over at Most Offensive Video. A lot of it comes from the slang from the Kwanzaa stories, but what made them funny wasn't the street talk. It was that Charlie Brown and Linus were speaking it. Put the lines in actual black dudes and they don't work as well.
Still the movie makes up for the manic riffs and one liners, by having a kind of circular narrative, far more interesting that a line-o-rama, and a long SNL sketch.
The other drug lord who wants the cat back is played pretty funny by the fellow comedian guy from CC. So there's that.
The GCI and real kitty moments are adorable and similar to those 'kitty in cute peril slides off a desk or a window sill' YouTube videos. Sometimes though the violence in the story makes it look like kitty is in actual peril, when he likely is not even real in those scenes.
Kay and Peele are not Eddie Murphy in his time, or Dave Chapelle in his, but they try. They could be cast in a Lethal Weapon comedy remake, but this kind of us one.
Review by Kal Kat
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