Keanu Reeves: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

3. Neo - The Matrix (1999)

There's no way you could do a list about Keanu Reeves and not mention The Matrix. While Bill And Ted was the film that launched his career, this is the film that immortalised Reeves, for good and bad (as we'll see later). The Wachowskis' film broke new ground in many ways, making martial arts films popular again, pushing the special effects envelope with "bullet time", and setting the aesthetic standards (alongside Gattica and Dark City) for a new generation of sci-fi fans. On the very slim chance that you've never seen it, The Matrix is a sci-fi action movie set in 1999 (or so it seems). Reeves plays Thomas Anderson, a software developer by day and a hacker nicknamed Neo by night. One day he has a fateful encounter with a woman named Trinity, who informs him that everything he thought was real is in fact an elaborate illusion created by machines. After meeting her boss Morpheus, he takes a trip down the rabbit hole into a horrifying reality that no-one could have imagined... Neo is very much an everyman character, spending much of his time reacting in amazement as everything he took for granted is dismantled, de-constructed and re-contextualised. He serves as the audience's way in to a series of fascinating concepts and philosophical questions, and it therefore makes perfect sense to put Reeves in the role. Not only does he not look physically extraordinary (in the way that, say, Hugh Jackman often does), but he plays the emotional developments with great naturalism. We bond with the character because his confounding reflects our own, and without getting this right, the film would have sunk without trace.