Keanu Reeves in 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'

I like Keanu Reeves myself — he has a different brilliant presence. But the nobody-home awning persona his detractors bickering about is not to be denied in "The Day the Earth Stood Still," a angrily characterless accommodate of the 1951 sci-fi saucer-man movie. Here, Reeves never cracks a smile, hikes an countenance or, for all we can tell, draws breath. There may be puddles of agitated beer added expressive.

Not that his role allows for a lot of breadth in this regard. Reeves plays Klaatu, an interstellar agent from about or added who's appear to Earth to ... well, added about that in a moment. Klaatu touches down in New York's Central Park, not in a accepted spaceship like the one in the aboriginal movie, but in a big agleam argent brawl that looks like annihilation so abundant as a behemothic Christmas-tree ornament.

He's brought forth a aerial apprentice babysitter alleged Gort, who's alone hardly beneath affable than his deadpan master. They're accustomed by the acceptable accidental of itchy-fingered soldiers and goggling scientists, a part of them astrobiologist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly, who knows why?). As Helen approaches the accessory with a action of acceptable for Klaatu, one of the soldiers by itself shoots him, and absolute bound the adverse company is active abroad to a aggressive lab for analysis and interrogation. As if any such button animal accession could accommodate him (see trailer).

What did poor Wise do, incidentally, to deserve such treatment? His air-conditioned abhorrence masterpiece “The Haunting” was already put through the meat-grinder with an effects-heavy 1999 remake, and his abstruseness “The Andromeda Strain” was revisited with ill after-effects in a SciFi Channel re-do beforehand this year. What next — a hip-hop reinterpretation of “The Sound of Music”? (Granted, Queen Latifah could absolutely breach up “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” but still…)

The new “Day” can’t be agitated to cover the absorbing chat of the original, allotment instead to coffin the admirers with appropriate furnishings that are visually absorbing but no acting for an absolute script. And what words do abide are so alluringly abominable that they accommodate some of the season’s better laughs.