The Keanu Reeves Project: The Night Before

THE NIGHT BEFORE  (Movie, 1988) - Winston

Apparently sometime in 1986 or 1987, someone out in Hollywood caught the mediocre but not horribly bad TV movie, "The Brotherhood of Justice" (formerly reviewed on this blog) and fell in love with the chemistry between Keanu Reeves and noted criminal and con artist, Lori Loughlin and decided to put the two of them in a feature film called "The Night Before."

This is a movie that I think I'd caught bits and pieces of on TV as a kid, but I certainly have never seen all of it and anything I did see back in the late 80's or early 90's had completely vanished from my brain when I sat down to watch this one.

"The Night Before" is sort of a cross between Adventures in Babysitting, The Hangover, and Taken.  Maybe it's because I was coming off the painstakingly bad experience that was "Babes in Toyland," because I was pleasantly surprised with "The Night Before" and even had a handful of actual laugh out loud moments.

The movie opens with Winston (Keanu Reeves), alone, somewhere on the wrong side of the tracks (literally) in Los Angeles.  He looks pretty beat up, he gets his car stolen and he can't remember exactly how he ended up here, except that his night started with him taking the hot girl from school to the Prom.

Check out the price of those donuts!

Through a series of flashbacks, Winston starts remembering how the night started and ventures through a journey of East LA, searching for his Prom date so her police chief father doesn't literally murder him for losing her.

Tara (Lori Loughlin) has made it no secret that the only reason she's headed to the Prom with Winston is because she lost a bet with one of her friends.  Apparently, in this movie, I'm supposed to believe that Keanu Reeves is the school geek and Vice President of the Astronomy club.  This was really one of my only true gripes with this movie.  Keanu Reeves?  Geek?  It's 1988, they could have at least put some pocket protectors on him or given him glasses....or anything really.  There is literally no effort made to make it appear that he's anything other than a pretty cool, friendly guy.

As far as I'm concerned, this is what qualified for a geek in 80s pop culture.

Regardless, Tara is disgusted by him and disgusted by the entire situation.

We quickly learn that Winston had gotten lost on the highway, driven over some train tracks, and ended up lost in East LA.  Living without GPS really sucked.

Winston, chill dude that he is, decides to make the best of the situation.  Instead of going to Prom, let's find something fun to do here!

Any movie with Tiny Lister is A-OK by me.  

They wind up inside a club where Winston loses Tara's credit card to a bartender, who proceeds to drug Winston's ginger ale and tequila (I love that he ordered this) with an unknown substance.  This in turn causes Winston to accidentally sell Tara to a pimp named Tito, and he spends the rest of the movie in the present, trying to track Tara down before she's sold off to human traffickers intent on shipping her off to Morocco.

There's also a pretty funny dance sequence here with Keanu and Lori to a George Clinton song, who is actually playing at the club.

Funkadelic

A bunch of hijinks ensue as Winston tries to track Tara down, all while he's under the threat of being killed by Tito at sunrise. 

Spoiler alrert: Winston finds Tara, wards of Tito and saves the day, all without being murdered by Tara's father.

Still not quite John Wick.

BEST PART: The entire sequence at the club, genuinely funny.

WORST PART: More uncomfortable sexualization of an underage girl and the filmmaker's not really grasping the implications of some of the storyline about sex trafficking...

Box Office Mojo information:  N/A - Oddly, I could not find any information on this...maybe it was straight to video?

Rotten Tomatoes: 55% Audience

IMDB: 6.4

My Movie Rating: 6.5/10.  As far as 80's teen comedies go, you could do a lot worse than this one.  Is it stupid?  Yes.  Is it believable?  No.  But Keanu Reeves is legitimately funny in this, particularly during the scene where he's drugged.  This movie isn't going to change your world, but if you're a Keanu fan it's well worth the 90 minutes for some very casual or light hearted viewing.  

Keanu Rating: 7/10.  As said above, he had some very funny moments in here.  My only real complaint is the horrible miscasting here of Keanu as a geek.  

Up next - The 1988 movie "The Prince of Pennsylvania."  I have no clue what this is.