Keanu Reeves — Eff Bee Aye agent, knower of kung fu, reluctant destroyer of sad sandwiches — cordially invites you to abandon your family on Christmas Day to watch him and roughly four-dozen of his best samurai buddies fight some dragons. And not your regular, run-of-the-mill, Benedict Cumberbatch–sneering-in-a-mo-cap-booth, slouching-along-at-a-hyperreal-frame-rate dragons. Here there be dragons made of magical geishas and infinity-kimonos and gushing hellfire, who threaten you with mountains of corpses and dudes tattooed head to toe in the finest skeleton body-art. (Do they have guns? OK, they have guns. Cool.) Keanu’s dragons are not messing around. They’ve seen DragonHeart and everything, and they aren’t impressed. Connery totally phoned it in.
But enough about the dragons. What Keanu’s actually inviting you to do is choose his fight over Ben Stiller’s battle with his imagination and Raging Bull and Rocky’s attempt to murder each other in the ring over a paycheck. There’s going to be a lot of fighting on Christmas Day. “Whatever happens, whatever you see … there is no going back.” Well put, Keanu. Though, to be fair, you can go back and watch all the movies. You probably want to see how Balboa vs. LaMotta turns out. De Niro can go pretty nuts when someone’s dangling a big bag of cash in front of him these days.