Here’s a quick snippet from an interview with William Gibson in 2014:

“I was really fond of the film that I wrote and that Robert shot, but that wasn’t the film that Sony Image Works released. It’s a really extreme example of not being the director’s cut. It was written to be comic in its own way, and be a commentary on sci-fi films and how they are made. Keanu never played any of it straight because we didn’t want him to.”

So yeah, it sounds like Keanu’s performance was intentional but then the studio messed with the movie so much that his performance didn’t make sense anymore.