Keanu Reeves is one of Hollywood’s most likable luminaries. So, in Outcome, he should fit comfortably into the role of Reef Hawk, a cinematic icon beloved by all.
Unfortunately, that’s about the sole successful thing about writer-director Jonah Hill’s industry satire, whose sketchiness is second only to its inside-baseball humorlessness, and which squanders an eclectic all-star cast that can’t make hay of inauthentic material that wishes it were Seth Rogen’s The Studio.
Premiering on Apple TV on Apr. 10, Outcome—whose generic title is a dead giveaway about its vague aimlessness—centers on Reeves’ Reef, who for decades has been America’s favorite movie star following a song-and-dance performance as a kid on The Tonight Show that serves as this film’s cutesy opening.
Four decades later, Reef is a veteran of innumerable blockbusters but is now attempting to re-enter the spotlight after a five-year hiatus, and with the aid of his two best friends Kyle (Cameron Diaz) and Xander (Matt Bomer), he prepares to answer questions about the reasons for his absence.
As it turns out, the cause of this career pause was addiction. Although, as indicated by Reef’s relentless egosurfing on Google, his drug habit hasn’t become public knowledge. Nonetheless, Reef’s anxiety about having his reputation ruined is all-consuming, such that he snaps at Xander for interrupting his friendly conversation with crew members (post-Van Jones interview) and, worse, for calling that chat “MOP-ing” (an acronym for “Man of the People-ing”)—a comment that Reef clearly fears will reveal him to be a calculating performative phony.
Reef’s stress levels go up a few more notches when he gets a call from Ira (an unrecognizable Hill), his crisis lawyer, with concerning news. Despite having seemingly covered up Reef’s past indiscretions—a lifelong chore, since the actor has spent most of his working life behaving badly—Ira has learned of a mysterious, damning video that, if released, would ostensibly wreck his image.
The solution to this problem, according to Hill’s professional, is for Reef to go on an apology tour to make amends with those he previously wronged. As he learns from Ira, his assistant Sammy (Ivy Wolk), and just about everyone else, that list is long, forcing him to reconnect with the numerous individuals he treated poorly on his way to the top.
Outcome’s focus on sad-sack celebrity regret is reminiscent of Noah Baumbach and George Clooney’s navel-gazing Jay Kelly. Yet from the outset, the film undermines its own premise by failing to convincingly portray Reef as someone who might have ever been as selfish, callous, and all-around jerky as everyone claims.
Reeves is believable as a charming A-lister, but his mopey in-recovery routine never hints at the ugliness that everyone constantly attributes to him, and the dissonance between what’s said and what’s seen is great enough to neuter the proceedings’ entire conceit.
In its early going, Outcome struggles to be rat-a-tat-tat amusing, first and foremost because of Hill. With a scraggly beard and bald head, the actor/writer/director comes on like wildfire as Ira. An insincere wheeler-dealer whose motormouthed rants about the challenges of covering up scandals in the modern internet age, Reef’s randy heyday alongside Charlie Sheen and Stephen Hawking, and displeasure with eco-friendly toilet paper—the last while he sits on the can and lectures Reef—his character strives to give the action its sharp edge.
Hill’s scenery chewing never lets up, continuing in a boardroom meeting with a cynically constructed crisis team of anti-bigotry crusaders. However, as with the portraits of Kevin Spacey and Roseanne Barr that line Ira’s office walls, he’s merely a strained one-note joke.
Ira is the vehicle for Outcome’s most pointed barbs, such as a crack about how hating Jews doesn’t hurt careers and, in fact, might help them—followed by a punchline-y cut to a picture of Kanye West.
For significant stretches, though, the film focuses on Reef’s woe-is-me visits with the folks he’s hurt, none of which deliver the humor or pathos they seek. Reef’s sit-down with his fame-hungry reality TV star mom (Susan Lucci) is a dud, and his contrite meeting with his ex-girlfriend (Welker White) is a similar dead end. Even his reunion with original manager Red—played poignantly by Martin Scorsese—in the bowling alley that serves as the man’s de facto office is dramatically inert, undone by a Reeves performance and Hill’s script that falter by presenting Reef as merely a morose blank.
“Honk if you can separate the art from the artist,” reads the bumper sticker on Ira’s minivan. Yet that dynamic is wholly absent from Outcome—the result of creating no sense of Reef as either a marquee actor or a junkie lout, both of which we’re told about (ad nauseam) rather than shown.
It’s as if key scenes are missing from this 84-minute affair, whose story proceeds bumpily, and whose supporting characters have largely been imagined in a single mirthless dimension, including Diaz’s Kyle, whose heartfelt third-act speech is predicated on deeply rooted issues to which the film has only cursorily alluded.
Bomer earns a few laughs as the unfiltered Xander, whether he’s slamming vaping (“They’re literally an oral fedora”) or complaining about the “heroin doll store” he had to frequent to procure Reef’s preferred illegal substances.
He’s not nearly enough, alas, to prop up Outcome, whose tale does nothing with David Spade, Roy Wood Jr., and Drew Barrymore as a version of herself who’s unafraid to dish out profane Ellen DeGeneres insults. Worse, it wrongly assumes that Reef’s self-created pity-party plight is emotionally engaging, leading to straight-faced sequences that land with an anvil-grade thud.
Given its inability to sell Reef’s predicament (or response to it), it’s no surprise that Ouctome’s revelation about the nature of the blackmail video is beyond underwhelming. Leaning into mushiness one final time, the film arrives at a conclusion that feels half-formed and inconsequential, the latter a byproduct of the fact that Reef’s career is never something we’re made to care about in the first place.
Saying nothing new or funny about Hollywood and its narcissistic denizens, Hill’s faux-black comedy is a washout in every respect, with irrelevance its likely outcome.
