Keanu Reeves has been a big name in Hollywood for over 30 years dating back to his breakout turn in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but he’s spent almost the entire time since then batting away accusations that he’s not a very good actor. While he admittedly doesn’t possess the same sort of range or ability to disappear into a role as many of his contemporaries, calling him wooden is both reductive and a huge disservice.
After all, you don’t spent three decades at the top of the A-list without doing something right, and there are many more strings to Reeves’ bow than simply cementing his position as one of cinema’s all-time great action heroes over and over again. A case in point is the period of his filmography sandwiched in between the first two installments in the John Wick franchise, which saw him tackle a number of roles that wouldn’t typically fit within his wheelhouse.
He played a cheating husband in Eli Roth’s steamy Knock Knock and lent support in Nicolas Winding Refn’s psychological horror The Neon Demon, sun-baked dystopian tale The Bad Batch and insightful drama To the Bone, while he voiced the titular feline in Key & Peele’s Keanu. The Matrix star also pitched up in a courtroom thriller, and The Whole Truth is coming to Netflix next month on May 1st.
Keanu Reeves plays a defense attorney in the pic who inherits a case trying to get his 17 year-old client acquitted for murdering his father, and he ends up enlisting a young lawyer to help him crack it open. It’s a standard setup that offers no surprises, but a courtroom thriller is always watchable at the very least if handled correctly, and The Whole Truth is a solid enough entry into the subgenre with an added dose of The Matrix star for good measure.
