Keanu Reeves is a treasure. Thanks to his genuine love of the craft, I’m always willing to see whatever he decides to be a part of. No matter the project he always gives as much effort as possible, sometimes even elevating the worst sounding film into something amazing. So naturally a team up project between Reeves and hit-or-miss thriller director Eli Roth was going to be an interesting watch regardless of how the final project ended up.
But you know what I didn’t expect? This absolute mess of a film. Take a B grade premise, Keanu Reeves, some terrible actresses, weird directorial decisions, bad dialogue and what do you get? An hour and a half of my life stolen from me.
Knock Knock
Directors: Eli Roth
Rated: R
Release Date: October 9th, 2015 (in theaters and VOD)
Knock Knock stars Keanu Reeves as Evan Webber, a family man with a loving wife and two kids. When his family goes away for the weekend, two girls Genesis (Lorenza Izzo) and Bel (Ana de Armas) suddenly show up in the middle of the night asking for help. After seducing Evan, he ends up sleeping with them. But after he wakes up the next day, Evan realizes the two girls have some sinister motives. And that’s pretty much it. The best thrillers can mine even the thinnest premises for good character work or story material, but that all hinges on whether or not the film has a strong written frame to build on. Unfortunately for all of us, Knock Knock is basically written like a film student’s first draft hastily put together two hours before the assignment was due.
Don’t get me wrong, I can accept bad dialogue in a horror/thriller because it’s usually in service of a greater goal. Maybe the film’s intentionally bad or its wackier elements help bring levity to the potentially gruesome nature of the genre, but there isn’t just bad dialogue here. The entire package is crafted terribly. From how long it takes to actually get the story moving as the girls don’t show up until a third into the film (thus making the terribly written and acted family scenes feel much longer and awkward), to the fact that Evan literally has to sleep with the girls to get to the core of the drama, to how many times it resorts to “crazy bitch!” whenever characters are under duress, to the girls’ nonsensical motivations (half revenge, half complete banality), to Evan being a former DJ for some reason, and finally for weirdly off putting lines like “Bitch, you’re barking up the wrong f**king tree! I’m from Oakland, hoe! I know two ghetto ass hoes when I see them!”
Yeah, that’s definitely a thing someone says in the movie. That line somehow made it through numerous edits, drafts, and cuts into the final product. I bet whoever wrote this line did one of those fist pumps to celebrate how clever he was.
I could write about how terribly everything was put together all day, but to get to the core of my issues with Knock Knock I need to do something I’ve never done in one of my reviews before. I have to outright spoil one of the key plot points of the film because it’s something I desperately want to tell you about. I’m sorry if you were still somehow interested in the film after reading thus far, but I promise I’ll keep the spoilers limited to this chunk of the review. Okay, so you know why the girls are invading houses and having sex with men in order to humiliate them and ruin their lives? Because men are monsters. There’s a hint at some child abuse (which also compounds yet another horribly conceived “idea” on top of this garbage heap), but we’re just supposed to believe that these two girls are going around messing with dudes as some kind of misappropriation of the “femme fatale” concept. Sex as a weapon can be fine in media, but if the justification for its use is just so that same character can “trap” a man, it’s completely backwards thinking and singlehandedly sets back all of the good work women have done in media
I would’ve accepted these extremely thin motivations had there been actual depth with the two girls, but their actions far exceed the range of their revenge. And Knock Knock goes out of its way multiple times to remove any sense of sympathy or even desire to exist from the characters entirely. When Evan threatens to call the police, the two girls threaten to send him to prison with cries of not just rape, but statutory rape. Thus adding yet another mysogynistic reason this film is really just for older dudes unhappy with their marriages. In fact, Knock Knock‘s death knell is a speech Reeves gives that somehow sets his own career back a few years. You could hear his soul dying a little bit when he says, I kid you not, “You f**ked me! You came to me! You wanted it, you came on to me!…It was free pizza! Free f**king pizza! What was I supposed to do?!?”
Sure Knock Knock has one or two moments where all of its badness coalesces into a surprisingly humorous bit, as every film gets one regardless of how bad it truly is, but nothing is good enough to warrant wading through the rest of it.
Knock Knock isn’t just an embarrassment for all involved, but for the first time, Keanu Reeves looked like he was genuinely phoning it in. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but I was almost enamored by how much Reeves was trying to distance himself from the character. He gets bad dialogue and weird movies all the time, but he usually can transcend the material thanks to his effort. And the saddest thing is this is coming after one of his biggest triumphs in the last few years, John Wick, which was also a film caught in this very situation. It was too a film full of cheesy dialogue and clunky writing work, but he made it something special.
Knock Knock is such a worthless heap of garbage, not even Keanu Reeves wanted to try to save it. If Keanu Reeves didn’t deem this worthy, why should we? This review is more attention than this film deserves, and I can’t wait until this fades from memory.
