It looks like I'm about to hit a bit of a rough patch here in the career of Keanu Reeves as I journey into the mid 90's. In fact, up until I hit "The Matrix" several movies from now, I have a lot that I am NOT looking forward to, including today's entry, "Little Buddha."
If there's been one overarching feeling I've had so far sitting through Keanu's list of movies that I have not seen before it would be boredom. I felt this way during "My Own Private Idaho," "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," "Dracula," and "The Prince of Pennsylvania." My feeling of wanting to shoot myself in the face during "Babes in Toyland" might be a cousin to boredom as well.
My recent viewing of "Little Buddha" continued my trend of boring movies I hadn't seen before, making me realize that hey, maybe there's a REASON I have never seen some of these movies. And the reason is that they suck. Boredom is the main reason it took me three sittings to get through all of the nearly two and a half hour slog that was this movie.
I went into "Little Buddha" knowing near nothing about it so it came to me as quite a shock that Keanu Reeves is playing....Siddhartha AKA Buddha, who is, you know, a guy from ancient India. You may or may not know this but Keanu's ethnic heritage is a mixture of a number of things but one of the things he namely is NOT is Indian, or anything resembling Indian. So, his casting in this role is just a tiny bit baffling to me. Maybe there were no Indian actors working in Hollywood in 1994? After all, "Little Buddha" is just a few years removed from Fisher Stevens playing an Indian guy in both Short Circuit 1 and 2.
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| Just a reminder that yeah, this is a thing that happened. |
"Little Buddha" takes place halfway in the present and halfway in the past. The present storyline is about a group of Tibetan monks searching for the reincarnation of one of their teachers, which leads them to find a little boy in Seattle who they think is a prime candidate. They eventually convince his parents (played by Bridget Fonda and Chris Isaak, who I will get to momentarily) to allow the child to go to Nepal for further examination to see if he is in fact who they think he is.
The other storyline is the one that features Keanu Reeves and tells the story of the Buddha and how he came to be. This part of the movie was slightly more interesting to me, particularly because I know very little about the origins of Buddhism. Of course, this is a movie and without doing further research necessary, I have no idea if what I watched on screen is the actual mythology or not.
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| He'll be out protesting for a haircut soon with the rest of the COVIDiots |
Some of the performances in "Little Buddha" are downright bad. Bridget Fonda is fine in her limited screen time, but the little kid is insufferably terrible, and I hate to say it but Keanu Reeves kind of stinks, although he was obviously horribly miscast in this role.
With that said, the single worst performance of the movie and possibly second worst performance in this entire project so far goes to Chris Isaak who gives the stiffest, most wooden performance I've seen in this project so far next to the emergency room doctor from my last recap of "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues."
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| My impression of Chris Isaak in "Little Buddha." |
After watching "Little Buddha," I read a small handful of critic reviews to see if there was something I was missing since I didn't find this to be particularly enjoyable. Critics seemed to really appreciate the art direction and cinematography but I just couldn't get past the constant use of color filters which started to drive me crazy about halfway through.
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| BLUE filter! |
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| RED filter! |
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| ORANGE filter! |
No real side notes on this one other than to say that I have no need to see this ever again.
Box Office Mojo Information: $4.7 million domestic ($10.7 million inflation adjusted) / $3 million worldwide on a 35 MILLION DOLLAR BUDGET, HOLY SHIT ARE YOU KIDDING ME? 153rd highest grossest movie of 1993. How the hell did this movie cost $35 million to make? Wow.
Rotten Tomatoes: 68% Critics, 53% Audience. This seems about right but based on it being a gigantic flop I'm a little surprised these numbers aren't lower.
IMDB: 6.1
My Movie Rating: 4/10. To repeat, I was mostly bored throughout and if it weren't for the saving grace of some of the origination story I'd be giving this a 3.
Keanu Rating: 3/10. He is miscast, he may or may not be trying to do an Indian accent at points, and he really never should have been in this in the first place. This is not entirely his fault.
Up next: the 1994 movie, "Speed." Fuck. Yes. This is the last movie before I hit a real dead zone of movies I'm not excited about.
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