You probably haven’t noticed Keanu Reeves’ absence from the big screen over the last few years because to say that you have noticed would imply that he’d actually made a movie worth your time in recent memory. That’s clearly not the case. He returns to theaters with his first starring role since 2008’s The Day The Earth Stood Still in Malcolm Venville’s Henry’s Crime an ensemble comedy about a bunch of bumbling Buffalo natives who plan to rob a bank despite the fact that their ringleader just got out of jail for “attempting” the same job a year earlier.
The film focuses more on the ensemble than the heist and Venville assembled a great cast (including James Caan Vera Farmiga Bill Duke and Fisher Stevens among others) to fill the various roles but he and screenwriters Sacha Gervasi and David White wasted all that talent on an uninspired script that’s frustratingly executed by the director. It’s as if they were writing a pair of separate films simultaneously and just sandwiched them together hoping that two kinds of vanilla would magically create a unique new flavor. It doesn’t especially when both the romantic and comedic aspects of the story are as bland as the dreary blue-collar setting.
But wait it gets worse. There’s virtually no tone to the film; it moves along at an excruciatingly boring pace as its comatose characters interact with one another. The pin-drop silence that runs through a large part of the picture has the same effect as an Ambien and will undoubtedly leave you snoring. You know you’re watching a bad movie when the only sign of life comes from the soulful soundtrack comprised of R&B tracks from the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Vera Farmiga bless her tries hard to make her fledgling actress and anti-romantic character interesting but she’s got nothing to work off of because her co-star the always wooden Reeves is so naïve innocent and awkward it’s sickening. James Caan is endearing as a make-shift father figure for Henry; I found myself wishing that the story was told from his semi-comical point of view. And though I’d pretty much watch Peter Stormare in anything (he’s funny as Farmiga’s foreign theater director) he’s hardly got enough screen time to save Henry’s Crime from the qualitative abyss.
