Keanu Reeves doesn’t play the villain very often, which is completely understandable when the majority of audiences would refuse to buy it. After all, the 56 year-old has long had a reputation for being one of the nicest and most affable personalities in Hollywood, and the Bill & Ted Face the Music star is basically so beloved that people simply won’t accept him as the bad guy.
That doesn’t mean he can’t play characters with shades of grey, though, and one of his most overlooked recent efforts saw him do just that. In Eli Roth’s Knock Knock, Reeves portrays a married architect who welcomes two attractive strangers into his home. Some extramarital foul play inevitably takes place, but before long, the situation starts to spiral dramatically out of control.
An intriguing blend of the home invasion premise and an erotic thriller, Knock Knock doesn’t quite manage to deliver on the exciting plot, but you can always rely on Reeves to do a solid job, and his reserved performance is one of the greatest strengths in a movie that stretches the limits of logic and plausibility to the breaking point.
Even the star of John Wick couldn’t save it from box office disaster, though, and Knock Knock only scraped together a soft $6 million, although that was still enough to turn a profit given the $2 million budget. The forgotten flick arrives on Netflix this week, on November 1st, and based on the leading man’s enduring popularity and the streaming service’s reputation as the place for underrated titles to find a second life, don’t bet against it managing to secure a place in the Top 10 list shortly after it hits the platform.
