The Keanu Reeves Project - Exposed

EXPOSED (2016) - Detective Scott Galban

So the tale of the movie "Exposed" is an interesting and sad story and I am so glad I went back and not only read some background on it but then went back and watched it again (sort of).

About 60% of the way through my recent watch of "Exposed" I hit the pause button because I started thinking to myself, "why the fuck is this movie so goddamn convoluted?  There has to be something going on here!"  

And that's when I went to IMDB and read some interesting trivia: 

"Exposed" was originally shot as a movie called "Daughter of God," and is nearly unrecognizable from what it ended up as after Lionsgate got their hands on it, edited it to death and almost completely changed the story from a surreal-ish film starring Ana de Armas with Keanu Reeves as a side character into a story starring Keanu Reeves featuring Ana de Armas as a side character in a complete reversal of the films original intent.

This is the second recent movie that a studio has apparently butchered, but if Universal was guilty of negligent homicide for what they supposedly did to "47 Ronin" then Lionsgate is guilty of first degree murder for what they did to "Daughter of God" before turning it into "Exposed."

The final cut, edited beyond comprehension and then retitled "Exposed" turned out to be such a fucking disaster, that the director had his name removed and a pseudonym put in place because apparently he didn't want anything to do with this.  I had read that "Exposed" had done a real whitewashing of the original movie replacing a Latina main character to Keanu so I figured I might as well try to find that cut to see what this was intended to be.  The director (real name Gee Malik Linton) released the original version of the movie on his own via Instagram and so I decided to watch that after having seen "Exposed" because the released version of this movie is a serious fucking mess.

All this said, I suppose I'm going to give a recap here of "Exposed" since that was the final released movie followed by some notes on the director's cut version which is certainly a better movie albeit still a bit mediocre.

As always, spoilers ahead.

The movie opens with Ana de Armas as Isabel, hanging out at a club and she leaves with her future brother-in-law Manuel and some friends and we can see from a 1st person perspective that someone is watching and taking pictures of all of them.

Manuel walks Isabel to a subway station and tells her to get home safe, and we're treated to a shot of her walking through a long tunnel which was completely reminiscent of the very disturbing movie "Irreversible."  

Now if you haven't seen "Irreversible," there's a very horrible scene where noted Keanu Reeves movie alum Monica Belluci walks through a subway tunnel late at night and is violently raped in an uninterrupted 9 or 10 minute long unwavering single shot that I don't plan on ever watching again.  So watching Isabel walk through this tunnel had an incredibly ominous feeling for me and I'm pretty certain this was all intentional, as I'll get to at the end of this recap.

Subway Tunnel - "Exposed"

Subway tunnel - "Irreversible"

Isabel waits for the train but as she's waiting she breaks her heel and accidentally drops her engagement ring on the ground because it's too loose for her finger.  All of a sudden, a very odd looking albino man enters the station and passes Isabel and then literally floats above the tracks.  Isabel can't believe what she's seeing and when the next train comes, the albino man gets on and gives her a look but she decides to wait until the next train.

Yeah, I'll just wait for the next one

All of a sudden it's the next day and the subway station is now a crime scene and outside the station Keanu Reeves shows up as detective WHATEVER HIS NAME IS and finds out that his partner has been stabbed in the back and murdered in the train station.

From here, the movie really diverges into two seemingly very loosely connected stories and a lot of this really has to do with the absolute butcher job that happened in the editing room, eventually leading to the director disowning the movie entirely.  As a viewer, I expected that at some point Keanu's story would intersect with Isabel's story and it does, but it takes a real long and winding road to finally get there.

Rather than bore you with going with this movie linearly and also because that's impossible, I'll do my best to shorten this all and summarize what actually happens from here on as the two stories finally converge towards the very end of the movie.

On the Keanu side of things - he spends the majority of the movie trying to investigate the murder of his partner in a relatively paint-by-numbers police drama.  This involves an entire subplot where he follows around and interrogates several of Manuel's friends including one who may or not have been played by Rajon Rondo, because right after the murder, the cops find Joey's digital camera which has the photos on it that we saw were being taken in the opening scene.  

Still unclear if this was Rajon Rondo or not

We also learn that Keanu's dead partner, Joey, was a real crooked fuckhead cop who robbed drug dealers and occasionally sodomized them with broomsticks, including Manuel.  The main suspect in the murder of Joey is some criminal, Jonathan Jones street name "Black," who also starts following around Manuel and all of his buddies, eventually murdering (both on screen and off) most of them for reasons I never came to understand.  We really never learn Black's motivations here and it's just really, really bad storytelling.  We learn that Black had his own run-ins with Joey prior to the murder, which is why Keanu suspects him in the first place but why Black starts murdering all of Manuel's buddies is never really explained nor does it really matter.

Meanwhile, we also learn that Keanu's wife is dead and he's so fucked in the head that he can't even properly take care of his son, sending him to live with his sister in Florida.  Poor kid, nobody should have to grow up in Florida.  Once again, none of this is really explored and that's just fine because none of this matters either.  Like I said, the final cut version of this movie is the epitome of shitty storytelling.

Keanu gets told by his lieutenant to drop the case because Joey was a scumbag and probably got what was coming to him.  Besides, his widow Janine, played by an almost unrecognizable Mira Sorvino, is getting Joey's full pension and if Keanu digs around too much he could threaten that.  Keanu has a few scenes with Janine and she eventually seduces him and they bone down because sure, if you're going to put Mira Sorvino in your movie you might as well give her something to do.  I also should note that she's actually pretty good in this and one of the more believable acting performances, but who could really care since most of the rest of this movie was garbage.  

Didn't even realize this was Mira Sorvino until the credits rolled

Keanu starts realizing that all of the people in the photos he has are one by one ending up dead (at the hand of Black, which Keanu does not know) and the only one who seems to still be alive and kicking is Isabel but he doesn't know what her connection is to any of this.  Eventually, Keanu arrests Jonathan Jones for the murder (despite any evidence), but he is released and the case is dropped against him because we learn that Joey has been accused of rape by some woman, although I have no idea why that would lead to the case being dropped nor does it matter in the context of the movie.  As I've said already, this movie is a convoluted dumpster fire.  As this part of the movie comes to a conclusion, Black attacks Manuel, shooting him off-camera but as he's trying to finish the job, Manuel pulls a knife and kills Black in self-defense. 

That's sort of where Keanu's story ends until the last 10ish minutes of the movie.  But all of this is actually interspersed with what was really intended to be the actual story, which is mainly about Isabel.

After she sees the floating man she returns to her normal life which we see glimpses of here and there.  She lives with her fiance's family in New York and they are all very religious.  Isabel leads a number of prayer groups at the home and we find out that her fiance, Jose, is serving in the military in Iraq.  They all speak on occasion through video chat and await his safe return home.

Meanwhile, Isabel is a teacher at a pre-school where she begins to become close to one of the kids there named Elisa, who is clearly having some problems at home.  While all of this is going on, Isabel keeps having visions of what she comes to believe are angels who may or may not be the same thing as the floating man she saw in the subway at the start of the movie.  The angel consistently reappears throughout the movie and we're never really sure if this is real or a figment of Isabel's imagination.  

The single scariest movie angel I've ever seen

Then, tragedy strikes and Jose is killed in Iraq and naturally, the entire family, including Isabel is devastated but she quickly returns to work shortly after the funeral.  One day after school, Elisa's mother doesn't come to pick her up so Isabel decides to take Elisa home herself.  When she gets to her apartment, a creepy-ish man answers the door, who we assume is the father and Isabel has a near panic attack on her way out of the building for reasons that we don't know.  She gets home and vomits and the next scene cuts to her at the doctor finding out she's pregnant.  

This is of course impossible because she's been faithful to Jose, who has been deployed now for over a year.  Isabel, not really thinking very clearly, tells the entire family over dinner that there's been a miracle and that she is pregnant.  The family treats this with a mixture of skepticism and derision because they rightfully assume that Isabel has cheated on her now-dead fiance and they kick her out of the house, forcing her to go back and live with her parents in a bit of a shoddy apartment elsewhere in New York.

These are not the faces of approval

Isabel, who apparently has a second job as a waitress, continues to see her vision angel who is actually more scary than protective, and after leaving work one day she sees Elisa dangerously walking in the middle of the street.  Isabel rushes over to pull her out of traffic and notices that she's all bruised up but won't say what happened to her.  Elisa refuses to be taken home again so Isabel agrees to take her back to her own apartment for the evening.  

Quickly cutting back to Keanu, he's back at the police station looking at some evidence that was gathered at the subway from the night of Joey's murder - he's got both Isabel's heel as well as her ring which is actually inscribed with her name.

Back at the apartment, Elisa runs out of a bedroom crying for help because there's a bad man in the house and then we cut to the flashback that actually ties all of this together - 

It's the night of the subway and Manuel walks Isabel to the subway station but hands her a knife for protection.  Isabel walks towards the train but is grabbed and attacked by Keanu's partner Joey, who violently rapes her (still not nearly as an on-screen attack from the aforementioned "Irreversible") near the subway and if you've been following along so far, this is why she's now pregnant.  Isabel, knife in hand, charges after Joey after the attack, stabbing him in the back and rolling him onto the train tracks right as a train comes and runs him over.  

Back in the present, Isabel has a knife once again and stabs the "bad man" in her apartment who turns out to be her father and the angel lady shows up again to witness the entire thing.  Finally, Keanu shows up (I'm still unclear how he tracked her down because everyone he had spoken to up until the point had refused to give him any information) and he sees a family photo in the home, which depicts both the young girl that Isabel had taken in as well as the man who was at the apartment earlier during the panic attack scene.

Let's wrap things up

See, it turns out that there really IS NO Elisa and everything has been one big manifestation in Isabel's mind - she was abused as a child by her father and had blacked out the traumatic effect of being raped in the subway and we've been being "Sixth Sensed"/"Fight Clubbed" this entire movie and basically everything Keanu had been investigating has been one big red herring.  Literally, there was basically no point to about half of the movie, although my intuition about the "Irreversible" connection turned out to be accurate, so hooray for me.  And then the movie ends.

"Exposed" is significantly worse than it sounds, mainly due to the atrociously scrapped together editing job to make this movie appear to be at least a 50/50 split between the two stories of Keanu and Isabel that are tied together by the loosest of threads.  They turned what was supposed Isabel's story of dealing with trauma into a really shitty police drama at the forefront and the story of Isabel as the background and it's just a complete fucking disaster.  

Have you seen this boy?

Because I guess I hate myself, I then decided to watch the director's cut which he made available for free to download because I was so curious to see the original intentions of the movie.  Sure, I'd already spent 100 minutes watching a very shitty movie, so what's another two hours in the long run for the sake of The Keanu Reeves Project?  I'm dedicated to this shit for my threes of readers, dammit!

So, the director's cut is certainly noticeably different than the trash that was put out, and while it's certainly a better movie it's still not great.  There are still many aspects of it that make it feel like a made for TV movie (minus of course all the rape) like all the weird transitions between scenes, but it's so obviously much more about Isabel's story with Keanu as a noticeably less important character rather than the other way around.  The story itself is far more coherent and there's about 25ish more minutes, almost all of it with the focus on Isabel with much of that on her relationship with the child who we find out later doesn't actually exist.

The director's version has a lot more of an air of mystery to it and feels a lot more put together than the released version. There's definitely more exposition in the director's cut including the rape sequence (still towards the very end of the movie) that gives us more of an understanding on how and why Isabel blocked the entire event out and formed these visions of the angels and the child that doesn't actually exist.  It turns out that after Joey had sodomized Manuel, he spent a lot of time following his crew around and wanted to further fuck with Manuel by raping Isabel in the subway.  As the movie progresses, it becomes clearer and clearer that something was certainly fucked with Isabel's family and that this has a lot to do with her relationship with the little girl so when the twist ending happens it's not completely weird and out of left field.

"Exposed" is half Keanu Reeves story, useless as it is and half Isabel's story and "Daughter of God" is more like 75% Isabel's story and 25% Keanu.  But at the end of the day I probably wouldn't recommend either of these movies, but if you had to choose one then the director's version is significantly superior and infinitely more coherent.  

Okay so now that that's all out of the way, some additional side thoughts on "Exposed"/"Daughter of God": 

*This movie features yet another dead dog, the third in this project by my count with one in "John Wick," and another that was killed after being hit by a car in "Pippa Lee."  Manuel has a really adorable pit bull that gets hit by a van and killed in this movie for reasons I don't understand other than as a fakeout because the next scene is the family mourning only to understand that it's over the death of Jose in Iraq and not the dog.  Really, what's the point in killing this dog?

Seriously Keanu, are you just now picking projects based on number of dogs killed?

*This movie is maybe 75% in Spanish, which is yet another reason it was probably a difficult release for US audiences since we don't know how to or don't want to read.  Even Keanu speaks a little bit of Spanish and wouldn't you know, he doesn't even sound that terrible.

*The very end of "Daughter of God" is certainly different - the angel returns Isabel's ring to her after she discovers her father dead on the street.  But that's actually just another vision because the dead person who she sees is not her father at all but one of Manuel's friends, murdered by Black.  She still returns home and murders her father just like in the "Exposed" and then we still learn the truth about the little imaginary girl Elisa.  It's still....weird and I honestly don't know which ending is better/or worse than the other.  Both of these movies have serious problems.  

*As dreadful as this movie is, Ana de Armas is actually quite excellent in it.  Still odd that she's starred in both of the last two movies of this project but I might just be a fan!

Don't mind me, just having a bit of a Fight Club moment over here.

*Joey, the dead cop and awful rapist piece of shit is the same actor who appeared in the earlier entry "Henry's Crime," who I had previously only known from the movie "Whiteboyz."  It's weird watching movies this way because random people seem to show up out of nowhere from previous entries.  

Better movie?

Box office information: $0 Domestic (Never properly released?)/$250,000 International.  Yeah, probably best this wasn't put out for public consumption.

Rotten Tomatoes: 8% Critic/16% Audience.  Yep.  

IMDB: 4.3

My Movie Rating: I have to give "Exposed" a 3, it's mostly a disaster in large part due to really unfortunate editing that completely ruined the director's vision.  That said, the original movie "Daughter of God" is still...not great.  Better, but I still couldn't recommend it to anyone and so that movie gets a 4.5.

Keanu Rating: God I don't even know, he's not really bad in it and has a scene or two where he's pretty great.  I'm just going to give him a 5 for this thing.

Up Next: Technically, Keanu's next IMDB credit is for the movie "Keanu," which I have seen and enjoyed.  But having seen it, I know that Keanu Reeves is only in this for about three seconds as the voice of the cat, so I will not be rewatching for this project.  So we're onto the 2016 movie, 'The Whole Truth," which I have never heard of.  I think I can guess where this is going...