071215 - RESPONSE TO GENERIC KEANU BASHING THREAD
Anakin McFly: First off, which ones and how many of Keanu's movies have you seen? His acting tends to be a lot better in his very early work, as well as in those indie films that nobody watches. That's what people seem to agree on, at least; I haven't seen many of those so I can't give my own opinion. Have you watched The Gift? That seems to be the title most thrown out when people mention the one film where they concede that he gave a brilliant performance.
Among the films I have seen, there is one point that I will continue to argue on, being a writer who pays too much attention to these sort of things: each of his characters are very different. The speech patterns, body language, mannerisms, yes even facial expressions of each character are not the same. Each is a unique person. They give off vastly different vibes. There may be similiarities, but no more than that found among any random sample of the human population.
If anything, Keanu is amazingly versatile. Even if you think he acts badly, you still have to admit that he does it in many, many different ways and is probably the most versatile bad actor in the history of cinema. There are a lot of supposedly good actors out there who always play the same character, and although they may do it well, I find that fairly boring.
Second point - some guy brought it up somewhere that while with most actors you watch their performance and are fully aware of watching them, Keanu usually plays it down to the extent that the viewer can imagine themselves in the place of his character and thus feel a part of the movie. Obviously this doesn't hold true in all his films, but for most of them there is a valid point there. Elsewhere, one of his co-stars mentioned how Keanu sometimes purposely underacts in order to make the rest of the cast stand out on their own merit without him taking up all the space.
Also, as I think ckage mentioned, there's the issue of subtlety. Most actors tend to overact in a way that looks good on screen but wouldn't be that realistic if witnessed in real life. Meanwhile, people are all different and all react differently. Maybe the majority of the population cry in the way portrayed by most actors, but there are also those who do so the way Keanu does, and so on for different expressions of emotions.
Personally I was fairly surprised the first time I discovered the amount of Keanu-bashing there was going on, back in the days when I was still at the beginnings of my Matrix obsession and honestly couldn't see what exactly was so horrible about his acting. For one, Neo was the first movie character I was able to fully identify with, and a truly talentless actor wouldn't have been able to connect with the audience that way.
Maybe I was just young then (10) and not too perceptive, but even now after watching several more of his films I don't see what is supposedly so spectacularly bad about his performances. If anything, most of the criticism appears driven by the media, who have not been on good terms with Keanu since the 1990s due to his unwillingness to engage in tabloid-worthy acts and his insistence on staying out of the limelight. Since then, it has become the cool thing to make fun of him and his acting. There is a bandwagon very much in existence.