Keanu Reeves: His Five Best and Five Worst Movies

Keanu Reeves is the kind of actor who needs a strong hand in the directors chair to deliver his best work. The five best performances of Reeves' career came when he was under the guidance of director with a strong vision and the ability to mold Reeves' performance. Give Keanu a bad or just mediocre director and you are in for one truly awful movie, as this list will demonstrate.

Here are Keanu Reeves' five best and and five worst movies...

Best 5. 'The Gift' (2000)

Case in point for my theory about Keanu and great directors, Sam Raimi made Keanu frighteningly menacing as a redneck abuser in The Gift. Reeves may only be a minor supporting player opposite Cate Blanchet, Katie Holmes and Hilary Swank as his wife, but he makes the most of his screen time crafting the perfect red herring character within Sam Raimi's ingenious southern noir tale.

Worst 5. 'The Lake House' (2006)

This risible romantic comedy has Keanu at his least energetic as a sadsack romantic opposite a bland Sandra Bullock. That would be bad enough just from that description but that would leave out the fact that The Lake House is a time travel movie involving a magical time traveling mailbox. That The Lake House manages to be boring with this ridiculous premise says something about how truly awful The Lake House. Strap in, this is only Keanu's fifth worst movie.

Best 4. 'My Own Private Idaho' (1991)

Director Gus Van Sant's sprawling, rambling, non-movie, movie, My Own Private Idaho casts an impossibly handsome Reeves as a rebellious scion of privilege who takes revenge on his wealthy family by dabbling in being a male prostitute and small time hustler. Reeves is incredible in the movie, more than holding his own against the volcanic sadness of River Phoenix's narcoleptic, pining, romantic. Not many actors of Reeves' youth could have hung so well with Phoenix, its the ways in which Reeves doesn't try to compete with Phoenix for the screen that makes the performance so brilliant.

Worst 4. 'The Watcher' (2000)

Keanu Reeves at his chubbiest as the world's laziest and least intimidating serial killer in The Watcher. Even James Spader can't get Reeves' lumbering, charisma void of a performance to something remotely watchable. The Watcher is inert and sloppy and Reeves' performance is the shining example of that criticism.

Best 3. 'The Matrix' (1999)

Yes, despite their recent bloated, overwrought nonsense movies such as Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending, I do see Lana and Lily Wachowski as visionary directors. They may be failing to recapture the magic of The Matrix but, The Matrix itself is an example of directors with a vision and the talent to bring that vision to life. The Wachowski's took the clay that was Keanu Reeves and molded exactly the performance they needed and thus are another point in my thesis about Keanu and great directors.

Worst 3. 'The Replacements' and 'Hardball' (2000/2001)

I decided to combine these two movies into one because they belong to the same genre and are awful in similar ways. Both The Replacements and Hardball are sports movies so bad that they make it appear that Keanu Reeves both hates sports and doesn't understand sports. I have no idea how Keanu feels about sports, but based on these movies, I would be surprised if he'd ever seen a football prior to The Replacements or a child before having made Hardball. Howard Deutch sadly, was not a bad director before he made The Replacements, a career nadir that led him to move permanently to television. Hardball director. Brian Robbins, on the other hand, was always a terrible director and Hardball was merely one of many examples of his badness.

Best 2. 'John Wick' 1, 2, and 3 (2014 /2017/ 2019)

But Sean, you may be saying to yourself, you don't honestly believe that director Chad Stahelski is a visionary director do you? No, for the record, I don't, at least, not yet. Stahelski has not proven himself a visionary but he is a crafty director with a vision and is exceptional at employing Keanu Reeves as John Wick to achieve that singular vision of creating one of the great franchises of hardcore violence we've ever seen. John Wick 1, 2 and 3 may not Criterion Collection classics, but as modern day grindhouse action flicks, they are a gloriously gory good time and Reeves is incredible in each movie.

Worst 2. 'Replicas' (2019)

Only the comedy trio from Rifftrax could possibly make Replicas a movie worth watching. Replicas is another of Keanu Reeves' inert performances where, left to his own devices by a hack director, Keanu barely rouses himself long enough to say lines and perform the actions necessary of an idiot plot. Reeves plays a scientist attempting to put human consciousness into robots and winds up cloning his wife and two of his three children after a car wreck. How these plots coalesce is laughably bad science fiction but Reeves dull performance makes Replicas bad from the perspective of boring rather than the kind of bad that can be fun and memorable.

Best 1. 'The Neon Demon' (2016)

Keanu Reeves is barely even in The Neon Demon but it is on his resume and is by far the best movie he's ever appeared in. Here, in Nicolas Winding Refn, we have Keanu working with a visionary director who gets exactly what he needs out of Reeves in a weird yet pivotal role as the sleazy landlord to Elle Fanning's rising star model. Reeves needs only a few scenes to communicate what a creep he is and Winding-Refn makes those scenes count as he builds atmospher and tension toward his shocking and vile conclusion.

Worst 1. 'Destination Wedding' (2018)

I'm sure many were waiting for me to place Eli Roth's Knock Knock as the number 1 worst movie of Keanu Reeves' career as Roth is a well known lightning rod of terrible directing and Knock Knock is a well known and reviled terrible movie. However, I've never wasted my time seeing Knock Knock to confirm its badness. I did however, quite painfully suffer through Destination Wedding, a torture porn of a different stripe.

It takes a true masochist to sit through Destination Wedding, a mumblecore wannabe that casts big stars Reeves and Winona Ryder, as insufferable guests at a wedding who start the least believable romance this side of Redd Foxx romancing Angelina Jolie or Roseanne Barr enticing Pete Buttigieg. Whatever incomprehensible pairing you can imagine, perhaps a chainsaw falling in love with a slice of wheat toast, will still be more believable and less torturous than Reeves and Ryder in this ungodly abomination of a movie. The worst movie of Keanu Reeves' career.

Best 5

1. The Neon Demon

2. John Wick 1, 2 and 3

3. The Matrix

4. My Own Private Idaho

5. The Gift

Worst 5

1. Destination Wedding

2. Replicas

3. The Replacements and Hardball

4. The Watcher

5. The Lake House

I could sub in several other awful movies for The Lake House like Sweet November with Charlize Theron or Chain Reaction or Man of Tai Chi, but The Lake House is more memorably terrible in my opinion.