★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Knock Knock teams
director Eli Roth with actor Keanu Reeves in this home invasion thriller.
Loving husband and father Evan Webber (Reeves) is home alone for a weekend
recovering from an injury when two girls appear in the dead of night, desperate
for his help. Before long, the girls’ ulterior motives come to the surface and
they are revealed to be a pair of femme fatales, here inexplicably to wreak
havoc on Evan’s cosy life.
One has to feel sorry for Keanu Reeves. After a string of
break-out roles, the man’s star power (and indeed, talent) has – with the
exception of John Wick – taken a nose
dive. For the first half an hour, his character’s confusion could easily be
mistaken for boredom, until he completely loses the plot in the final act and
resorts to a hysterical, screaming caricature that brings to mind the
oft-derided Nicholas Cage in many of his recent appearances (but, for the sake
of convenience, picture his turn in the remake of The Wicker Man).
So whilst Reeves swings between boring and hilarious, his
female co-stars Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas take the Marion Cotillard in Inception route of acting evil by
staring madly at everything and shrieking a lot. They’re supposed to be
torturing and abusing Reeves and assaulting us with moral conundrums, but
greater damage is probably done to our suspension of disbelief (and eardrums)
than anything else.
I’ve tried very hard to work out whether Knock Knock was attempting to make a serious
point about gender politics and reverse the usual roles of victim and tormentor,
or if it was, in fact, just woefully ignorant. If indeed the former is true,
then why on earth is it being attempted, of all people, by Eli Roth? This is a
man who has made his name working in an infantile comfort zone of grungy (and
frankly not very good) exploitation fare; the director you hire for brawn, not
for brains.
Even the nitty-gritty exploitation violence which one assumes
Roth could easily deliver on takes forever to appear, turning up late and
making half-hearted stabbing motions before staggering out of sight. The 18
certificate is wasted entirely on over-exuberant and really quite tedious
scenes of sex, mental abuse and general racket.
A workable premise capable of producing a neat, 70-minute thriller
with a nice little message to make up for the cruder elements is binned in lieu
of an hour and a half’s relentlessly loud white noise, brought to an insulting
full stop with a well-timed punchline that wasn’t earned at all
