If You Love Noir, Young Keanu Reeves Has a 88%-Rated Treat for You
Forget classic private eye tropes: this story gets much darker and tense without relying on the most exhausted genre cliches.
As a species, we share some similarities that are simply unavoidable. We need water and air to survive; we strive for beauty; and we can’t help but love Keanu Reeves and the genre of noir. These are just ultimate truths about our kind and there’s next to nothing we can do about them, right? Except suiting these needs as best we can.
Brace yourselves, because we have the perfect combination to suit two of your biggest desires: a young Keanu-led noir movie! Water and air are on you, though.
What Did Keanu Reeves Get Himself Into in 1986?
Many praise Keanu Reeves for The Matrix, John Wick, Constantine, or even Cyberpunk 2077 — but the truth is that the actor gave his perhaps best performance ever all the way back in 1986. River’s Edge is a criminally overlooked movie, and let us tell you: it’s as dark and bleak as they get. That’s where Reeves truly shone.
River’s Edge follows a bunch of horrendously bored and directionless teenagers. One of them murders his girlfriend, his mutual friend with the rest of the gang, and they struggle with an unnecessarily hard decision: do they give him up to the police or do they help him hide his crime? Keanu Reeves portrays one of the teens, and he’s in the same boat as them — he could do the right thing, but he’s just so bored…
River’s Edge Is an Overlooked Masterpiece
Despite its unique bleakness and resentful story that devours its audience alive, River’s Edge earned the “cult classic” badge but didn’t get as much recognition as it deserved. On Rotten Tomatoes, it boasts an 88% Critic Score paired with 75% from the viewers, and IMDb gave it a less impressive 6.9/10 score. Out of spite, we bet.
“The kids in River’s Edge were born with dead or broken hearts. <...> We looked at the kids in River’s Edge and said, ‘This isn’t a social commentary, this is a snapshot.’ The shock of River’s Edge isn’t that it shows kids who either kill or respond to death numbly; it’s that it shows those things in an American movie,” Rob Gonsalves from Rob’s Movie Vault wrote.
River’s Edge is a genuine tragedy of a lost generation, and it does hold back. Keanu Reeves is brilliant here, and so are other stars. You should definitely give it a watch, but don’t turn it on when you’re already feeling down: it’ll make you feel much worse.
Source: Rob’s Movie Vault