“He tried so hard, he hurt himself - many, many times,” Chen told me after I spoke to Reeves. Reeves even pulls out those Matrix fighting skills again, looking formidable, though perhaps a little less spry than he was twenty years ago. It seems pretty clear that he was, and we love him for it. There are spectacular fighting sequences, elements of Ed TV - with Tiger’s descent into darkness being streamed across the globe - and enough ridiculously over-the-top moments to make you wonder whether Reeves was intentionally going for camp. Chen’s character, also named Tiger Chen, is a traditionally trained Tai Chi protégé who starts entering televised amateur fighting competitions as a way to prove his chosen martial art isn’t just for old men in parks, and winds up entangled in an evil underground fighting ring run by Reeves’s villainous mogul, Donaka Mark. This newest stage of his career puts him in the director’s chair for the first time for the incredibly entertaining, unabashedly genre-loving martial arts flick Man of Tai Chi, starring Tiger Hu Chen, Reeves’s trainer on all three Matrix films. Bill and Ted 3 may, devastatingly, be in a “ dark period,” but Reeves seems to be Sad Keanu no more. That became irrefutably clear over the course of a delightful early morning interview in a stark hotel conference room one recent morning at the Toronto Film Festival.
