CineTV Contest #54 : Keanu Reeves an Action Hero and a Gentleman.
Jack Traven is a Los Angeles police officer, for whom surviving is no easy task, and he knows many tricks to face danger. He faces an ordeal when he is trapped in a bus that has a bomb installed in it that will explode if the vehicle slows down to less than 50 miles per hour.
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By choosing between taking a white pill (which will allow him to continue his sad and boring lifestyle), and a red pill, (which allows him to see life as it is), the virtual world in which Neo has been living manages to crumble, and he faces reality, not the life that had been built for him. Neo chooses the red pill and does not know what is real and what is not, he observes how humans are slaves of other people's vision, locked in a universe that we have adopted as our own.
John Wick once worked as a hit man with ties to the Russian mob. He leaves that life behind to start a more peaceful one with his wife, but she dies of cancer and leaves him a puppy dog as a final gift. The son of a former employer breaks into his house, kills the dog and steals his car. Out of revenge, he returns to his former lifestyle.
These three characters have something in common, they are played by actor Keanu Reeves, who avoids the luxurious lifestyle of Hollywood peers such as Tom Cruise, or Johnny Deep. He has often been seen riding the subway and is also a well-known philanthropist who donates millions of dollars to the fight against cancer.
Reeves is a peculiar actor, with four decades of career behind him, who presents an acting ability that allows him to work very solvently in genres as dissimilar as drama, comedy, action and even horror, being required among others, by directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Gus Van Zant, Kenneth Branagh and Kathryn Bigelow.
When I am asked what are my favorite films of this actor, Speed, the Matrix films, and the John Wick saga come to mind. I have to confess that I didn't like Point Break very much.
1.-Speed (Jan de Bont)
In 1994, I started a romance with a pretty lady who is now my wife, at that time we were given tickets to the premiere of the movie Speed.
We witnessed action and suspense in spades. Sandra Bullock, is Annie, and by an accident of the driver, must guide a bus full of people at breakneck speed through the streets of Los Angeles, and is supported by an officer of the SWAT group of the police of Los Angeles played by Keanu Reeves, they must maintain speed because if this decreases the bus will explode, all thanks to the evil actions of a terrorist played by Dennis Hooper, known to the police Jack Traven, who wants the amount of 3 million dollars or detonate the bomb with all passengers inside.
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This lead pair (Bullock and Reeves) squander chemistry and personality on screen.
At the end of the screening three films came to my mind such as Runaway Train by Andrei Konchalovski where two fugitives escape on a train where the engineer dies, and the train runs out of brakes, The Gauntlet, directed and starring Clint Eastwood where Eastwood must protect a witness and there is a scene where a bus is shot to pieces, and the classic Die Hard by John McTiernan.
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Speed is one of the best action movies of the nineties, is a visual spectacle, and action, where Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock and Dennis Hooper shine.
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Twenty-nine years later, my wife still remembers losing her sunglasses in the theater when she saw this movie.
2.- The Matrix Saga (1999) (Lana and Lilly Wachowski). "The Matrix Reloaded" (2003), "The Matrix Revolutions" (2003) and "The Matrix Resurrections" (2021) (Lily Wachowski).
When I saw the first movie of the series in 1999, I identified myself with it because I have always believed that I was in a simulated world, where there is more than one reality and that something or someone manipulates us by writing our life story.
In the reality that the Matrix offers us, we humans are used as power sources for the machines, as explained by the architect, the creator of the Matrix.
Here, Neo is the one chosen to save humanity, learns to use his abilities and the rules of the Matrix, being guided on this journey by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne).
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This saga conveys the idea that we have to believe, if we do not believe we can do something no matter how much we are actually able to do it, we will not do it. This is why the oracle plays cat and mouse with Neo, testing him on his knowledge of himself.
These are very philosophical ideas where your mind can get to interfere with reality.
Here, again Keanu Reeves shows great chemistry with his co-star in this case Carrie-Ann Moss (Trinity), both are very physical in their performances, facing the matrix and its minions in a world of virtual reality and artificial intelligence with viruses like Agent Smith (Hugo Weawing), bent on finding out about human behavior.
In addition to all the philosophical that contains the saga, the influence of Blade Runner is palpable in the sets and as for the excellent action scenes, its main influence is the Chinese action cinema, (in fact the choreographer of the first three films is the renowned Chinese director and choreographer Yune Woo Ping) and an anime in particular: Ghost in the Shell.
3.- John Wick Saga (2014) (Chad Stahelski and David Leitch) and its sequels: Chapter 2 (2017), "Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019) and Chapter 4 (2023). From Chapter 2 onwards the films are directed solely by Chad Stahelski.
This character presents a very high tolerance to pain, is very skilled in hand-to-hand fights, masters the use of knives and guns, wildly drives vehicles, can appear and disappear in front of several trained assassins, targets his enemies in vital areas such as the neck and groin.
He is a professional assassin, very skilled at discovering, devising and carrying out assassinations, making use of many resources such as the environment, weapons in the hands of dead enemies and even pencils. He is fluent in several languages, including English, Russian, Italian, Hebrew, and Indonesian. Like any good even assassin he has medical knowledge including basic first aid.
John Wick almost always breaks the rules and even fights on when he is seriously injured. He is the most ruthless professional assassin of all time.
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Keanu Reeves is an actor who with the right script and direction gives his best, acting as a solvent action hero as demonstrated in Speed and the Matrix and John Wick sagas, the latter two of the most groundbreaking franchises of recent times in the field of science fiction and action. This actor is characterized by filming the stunts himself, without using stuntmen, and is only comparable to Tom Cruise in this regard. He stands out for his charisma when facing action scenes.
Clearly I notice that this series is very much influenced by the masterful Spaghetti Westerns Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) in terms of the way of being of its protagonist, and John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1986),) for the action scenes that combined impossible shootouts and the use of martial arts.
In the movies I have mentioned, the hero's path is reflected, and the ethics between thieves and murderers.
Beyond his success as an action hero he is known as the boyfriend of the internet for his chivalry in 2005 during the delivery of his Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame one of his fans was in a wheelchair and he approached her to talk briefly with her. In 2011 he gave up his seat in the New York subway to a woman. In 2020 he attended the Oscar ceremony with an elegant woman, older than him, and many commented that it could be his new partner, until the actor clarified that it was his mother.
Good afternoon, this is my entry in the CineTV Contest #54 - Favorite Keanu Reeves Movie Link Aqui. Good luck to all participants.
The collage is of my authorship, being these the sources used Source, Source, Source.
The gif is my own and was made with the Canva software.
Posted using CineTV
Of the three selections, I don't know, but John Wick didn't hook me.
The other two were wonderful cinematic expositions.