Best Keanu: “Power and money. Is that what this was all about?”

Twenty years ago, over April-May 2003, I walked the Camino de Santiago. I did the traditional route from St. Jean Pied-de-Port, France, to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, which is about 764 kilometres or something like 500 miles.

The Camino is a legendary pilgrimage. Its history goes back at least to the Middle Ages, when everyday people would depart their homes from across Europe and walk, for days or months, to Santiago to visit the site where the the bones of Saint James were found (or buried — I can’t quite remember). In its purest form it’s a rigorous endeavour, with the most devout in those early generations begging for food along the way. In modern times, you can stay in hotels in the numerous small villages that dot the route in northern Spain and you can hire someone to carry your pack in more challenging sections.

The modern rigorous version is to carry your pack, walk — no driving if you want to stay in the Camino’s dedicated hostels, although cycles are sometimes allowed — staying in modest accommodations over several weeks. As I am writing about it now, I want to do it again. Which isn’t unusual — a common theme among former pilgrims is the desire to return and/or the complete absence of memory of how difficult and how miserable it was the first time. But today, right now, I want to go for a long spiritual walk in Spain.

I learned about the trek by reading Shirley MacLaine’s The Camino. In that book someone starts sending Shirley anonymous notes saying she must walk the Camino. She eventually does, has several past life visions along the way, including a gender-division experiment in Atlantis.

I had no such visions. But the Camino left an undeniable impact on me. One such impact is the memory I was having just now, as I sat down to write a post about the truly awful Chain Reaction.

The Camino Frances follows a very distinct route. Strictly speaking, you don’t have to follow it exactly, but the ease of following guideposts — yellow arrows painted on rocks along the way — means almost everyone treads along the same path for nearly all of those 764 kilometres. In one section, where exactly now I don’t remember, the Camino goes past an industrial waste site. It’s apparently unpleasant, leading pilgrims to enter a state of cosmic depression over the hours they spend going through or past it.

I say “apparently,” because I did not experience the industrial waste site. The independently published guidebook I’d bought at home and carried with me included step-by-step instructions of a detour that would allow a pilgrim to completely bypass the industrial waste and still end up back on the Camino.

That night, in the pilgrim’s hostel, conversation centred around the truly awful experience of the industrial waste. I was forced to admit I’d gone past it, because of the instructions I carried with me. A woman said with a smile to her friend nearby, “do you know, that this Canadian guidebook…” and she told him how my piece of reference material let me avoid the depression and misery at least for the day — instead, from what I can recall, I’d had a pleasant walk through the forest.

The man, smiling and teasing only slightly, said to me something along the lines of, “you know, there’s balance with the Camino. So if you got out of this, somewhere along the line…” Basically, my misery was yet to come, he was saying. You can only avoid the industrial waste for so long.

Which is kind of like Chain Reaction and its place in the canon of Keanu Reeves movies. It’s the industrial waste you thought you could avoid but was there waiting for you to finally experience.

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Yes, there are plenty of bad Keanu Reeves movies. What makes Chain Reaction so horribly bad is that it doesn’t have a right to be bad. And, on top of that, it’s still bad despite not having any of the elements that usually make me recoil at bad movies: misogyny, homophobia, etc., etc. There’s none of that in Chain Reaction. There are few women and no queer people, but it was also 1996. There’s no sexual exploitation and no under-the-breath anti-gay comments. It’s a straightforward “thriller” that’s morally above board, but as a cinematic product, is just awful.

It doesn’t have a right to be bad for one main reason: the cast. Let’s recall that this movie stars Keanu Reeves, Morgan Freeman, and Rachel Weisz. And Brian Cox and Fred Ward — the latter of whom I just saw play Keanu’s dad in the infinitely better film The Prince of Pennsylvania. This movie has no excuse to be so horrible and to waste the talent it somehow got signed on to star.

Because let’s also remember that this is not talent at any old stage of life. This is Keanu just two years after Speed. It’s Freeman two years after The Shawshank Redemption. Somehow, someone got these men at the prime of their careers to agree to this terrible film. (If this interview from 2001 is to be believed, Keanu signed on to a very different script, and maybe Freeman did too.)

Chain Reaction wastes Morgan Freeman and Keanu Reeves, and it also wastes that wonderful pairing of Keanu and Rachel Weisz. They are together for almost all of this film, and they are really, really good together. If there’s going to be a John Wick 5, I nominate Rachel Weisz to play anything alongside Keanu. Watching them in Chain Reaction tonight I almost wanted to turn on Constantine just to wash off the ickiness of a great pair in a terrible movie — even if Constantine is still overall not one of my favourites. At least Constantine isn’t Chain Reaction.

The weird symmetry with Chain Reaction and Constantine is that Rachel Weisz gets into a bath fully clothed in both films — in Chain Reaction, it’s to warm her up from hypothermia; in Constantine, it’s to help her regain her psychic powers. (Constantine makes a play to sexualize Weisz after this scene, but I digress). I still can’t figure out how they ended up in that house, though, or where that house even was or who owned it. I lost track of the plot early in Chain Reaction, which is an amazing feat considering the plot isn’t all that deep (I don’t think).

At any rate. Chain Reaction is the industrial waste of the Keanu canon. Or, more specifically, it’s the industrial waste day on the journey of going through the Keanu canon. Most of the days on the journey are fabulous. If you’re me, you’ll get the unexpected delight of the fantastic John Wick films, which you never would have bothered to watch were it not for this project. You’ll get lovely emotional films like Siberia and The Lake House which strike personal chords for you, chords that aren’t anyone else’s business but you know what they mean. You’ll get all those movies that challenge your memories and your childhood traumas and help you to sort through things that still hang on your psyche, and plain old sensory experiences like the first half hour or so of Knock Knock that is pretty fun to watch with a touch of THC — and that in and of itself will make you contemplate if taking THC is consistent with your sobriety from alcohol, which you’re striving so hard to maintain.

Overall, it’s a meaningful, deep journey, through the gateway of several dozen movies that all star one actor. And the industrial waste day is just part of it — because without the bad, you never recognize the good.

April 2023