The actor:	Keanu Reeves
The character:	John Wick
The film:	John Wick
The line:	“But now, yeah, I’m thinking I’m back.”

One of the things I’ve learned from screwing around Film Twitter as long as I have is that people will try to reclaim any action movie with a pulse. With that said, here’s what Keanu Reeves did from 2000 up until John Wick, a movie which came out almost a decade ago.

I haven’t seen all of these, but it seems safe to say that there was a long stretch where Reeves was not exactly tearing up cinemas. There are a couple roles here that I have a fondness for, like when he played Jack Nicholson’s romantic rival in Something’s Gotta Give (impossible not to like him in that!) or the lead in arguably the most Dickian of Philip K. Dick adaptations in A Scanner Darkly. For the most part, this is stuff that Film Twitter is either working hard to take back or not even bothering with. Then John Wick happened and, well, now, yeah, we’re thinking he’s back.

There are many actors whose careers are summed up in the most famous lines they’ve uttered, from Greta Garbo (“I want to be alone”) to Reese Witherspoon (“As if!”). Keanu Reeves is one of them now, which cements him with a certain kind of stardom. It’s not that Garbo and Witherspoon and Reeves can’t act, but that they are associated with an image so much more than they are with a style of performance. For better or worse, Reeves has a wooden affect in so many of his roles. He’s too sympathetic and his eyes are too tender for him to be steely, but you still get the sense of someone who is not all the way comfortable with his body unless it’s incredibly pliant: dodging bullets in The Matrix, firing bullets in John Wick.

Amusingly, the performer Reeves is most comparable to given things like box office success, personal popularity, and greatest genre success is almost entirely unlike him onscreen. Reeves is frequently minimalist, his voice low and murmuring even when he speaks urgently or angrily. Arnold Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, defined maximalist acting over and over again throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Like Keanu, Ahnold’s greatest strength as a performer is also a weakness in the wrong situation. Both men are so unusual that it’s difficult to work them in as anything but the star of a movie, and more than that the star of a movie where the entire thing revolves around them. They’re just too difficult to make part of an ensemble; they can lead one, but cannot blend in. And speaking of lines that define a career: how similar “I’ll be back” is to Reeves’ line speaks for itself.