‘Outcome’ Review: Keanu Reeves Is a Troubled Movie Star in Jonah Hill’s Desperate and Unfunny Comedy About the Pain of Public Opinion

Hill's Apple TV feature is only redeemed by a surprisingly heartfelt cameo from Martin Scorsese.

It’s no secret that Jonah Hill has been going through it. What exactly “it” is can be somewhat hard to pin down (even in the context of 2022’s “Stutz,” which glancingly touched on his brother’s unexpected death), and though I have my suspicions, the “Wolf of Wall Street” actor’s private battles would frankly, mercifully, be none of my business if not for the fact that he keeps making streaming movies about himself. 

But as “Stutz” would suggest, Hill struggles to open up despite his unabated desire for vulnerability, and feels that he had to turn his own therapy sessions into a Netflix documentary in order to force himself to an uncomfortably honest place. Fair enough — I’d probably do the same if a giant tech company agreed to pay for it, and it’s easy to appreciate why a famous person who feels targeted by “cancel culture” might come to believe that he can only conquer his demons if he slays them in public. 

What’s so bleak about Hill’s thinly veiled new comedy, a noxious, almost-movie featuring Keanu Reeves as a troubled star who gets extorted by an anonymous swindler, is that it plays like the work of someone who’s trying to convince himself that his demons are the public. The public and heroin. Erratic, petulant, and shot with a humor-killing hyper-saturation that smothers its Apatowian improv scenes under the sickly patina of a Gaspar Noé drug trip (the film was lensed by “Climax” and “Enter the Void” DP Benoît Debie), “Outcome” is nominally about a repentant soul trying to make amends with the people he’s wronged, but it seems more interested in focusing on the people who’ve wronged its hero in return. 

While a less cynical film might have been able to commit to the script’s “don’t believe your own press” redemption arc, Hill’s combative take on Hollywood reputation laundering only seems to believe its own script when arguing that the masses are clueless morons who don’t know the first thing about the celebrities they rush to judge. And maybe we are. But those are two very different movies, and there aren’t enough achingly tender John Prine songs in the world to paper over the gap between them. (Warren Zevon helped “Funny People” to successfully bridge that same divide, but I think there might be a little more to it than that.)

Reef Hawk has been America’s favorite movie star for the last four decades, during which time he’s been in countless hits and won two Oscars that he desperately needs TV journalists to mention on air whenever he does an interview — much to the chagrin of his underwritten childhood BFFs Kyle (Cameron Diaz) and Xander (Matt Bomer), who’ve abandoned their own lives to help Reef get back on his feet after five years of “finding out who he was away from all this.” Eat Pray Love as that sounds, “who Reef was away from all this” was, of course, a super-destructive heroin addict who treated everyone in his path like absolute dogshit while leaving his manic crisis lawyer Ira Slitz (Hill, cartoonishly styled as a cross between Maury Ballstein and a Jewish Mugatu) to maintain the actor’s reputation as the nicest man in show business. 

Reeves — actually the nicest man in show business — is a recessive passenger whose metatextual casting offers a convenient smokescreen for Hill to unleash his id, and Ira quickly asserts himself as the movie’s dominant force. That proves to be a fatal miscalculation, but it’s admittedly hard to stomach the thought of someone trying to smear Keanu Reeves for money, and so we can’t help but root for Reef when he learns that someone has an unearthed a mysterious tape that could ruin what’s left of his career. 

Ira encourages Reef to go on a disingenuous apology tour in order to sniff out which of the friends and loved ones he’s wronged might be exploiting his worst behavior for a quick payday, and our natural affection for Reeves makes it easy for us to share in his character’s wounded surprise whenever he’s read for filth by his mom (soap icon Susan Lucci playing a “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” reality star), or his ex (Welker White), or any of the other people he speaks to as part of this movie’s scattershot parade through his past. Fame and the pressures of maintaining it can seriously mess with a person’s head, and you don’t have to squint too hard to appreciate why Hill’s success may have preyed upon his insecurities and vice-versa to regrettable ends, just as you don’t have to squint that hard to picture how someone of Hill’s undeniable talent — one of the funniest screen presences of his generation — might have leveraged his personal experience into a probing and humane comedy about Hollywood mindfuck. 

That is, alas, a far cry from the movie that Hill offers here, which would have felt utterly divorced from reality even if the director hadn’t inexplicably decided to film most of it against an 180-foot LED screen that makes Los Angeles look like an irradiated hellscape, calls relentless attention to the artifice of the story at hand, and makes it all but impossible to engage with the emotional stakes head-on rather than reflect on how grotesquely they’ve been filtered through someone else’s trauma. Which is to say that Hill is on screen even when he isn’t on screen, though he’s actually on screen for a disproportionate amount of a film that doesn’t give itself the time to make anything of its main character (“Outcome” runs a jumbled 80 minutes, 75 if you take out the bit where Bomer does improv with Drew Barrymore over the end credits). 

Hill swears that his take on Ira is actually toned down from the real lawyers on which he based the character, but even so his carnival barker energy overwhelms the intimate nature of Hawk’s predicament, and combines with the rest of the movie’s garish aesthetic to sink any credible trace of human drama (Jon Brion’s weirdly militaristic score doesn’t help). A selectively woke disaster artist who screams about how Stephen Hawking was part of the original Pussy Posse but also insists that his bedroom be referred to as the “primary, not the master,” Ira is a live-action cartoon who calls Reef bubbe and manages his PR campaign from a boardroom that’s festooned with framed pictures of canceled icons like Kanye West, Kevin Spacey, and — amusingly! — Bill and Hillary Clinton. 

The joke works even if it confuses our impression that Ira is good at his job, just as the minute-chewing boardroom scenes, in which Ira flanks his client with a diverse group of white-washing experts, can be funny even though they’re wildly overcranked and missing any clear shape or momentum. It should be a crime to waste the likes of Roy Wood Jr., Atsuko Okatsuka, Laverne Cox, and Annie Hamilton like this, but it’s almost worth it to hear Cox defiantly insist that she “isn’t made of cum.” Besides, some of the movie’s famous drive-bys don’t even get to do that much; Van Jones, who recently suffered some very well-deserved blowback of his own, pops up just long enough to leave a bad taste in your mouth, while Kaia Gerber drops in for all of one (memorable) sentence, and Diaz and Bomer are both so reduced to voices in Reef’s head that I half-expected their friendship to be revealed as an elaborate Tyler Durden situation. 

The only person given the space to become a legitimate value-add? Hill’s one-time director Martin Scorsese, who always delights playing himself, but less often gets to sink his teeth into a real character. Here, in the most improbable of places, he delivers a weirdly soulful performance as Reef’s former child agent Red Rodriguez, who works out of a bowling alley and feels abandoned by his clients as they grow up. Red stars in the first and most emotionally coherent of the disconnected encounters that Reef has with the people he’s wronged, and it inches towards a confessorial kind of truth. So does the comparatively leaden scene where Reef confronts his mom on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” as she forces him to own up to his behavior with a little “Just because the cameras are rolling doesn’t mean it’s not real.” We don’t see any evidence that Reef was a monster, or learn the details of how, but it’s easy to appreciate how he might have used his work to inure himself from the truth of his actions. 

But in building so much of this movie around his own character, Hill gives himself license to make Ira and his war on “victim capitalism” the main event, which is ugly and unearned throughout, and made worse by the scream until the satire lands anti-charm of his performance. It’s constricted and desperate and altogether embodies the opposite of what’s made Hill into such an unimpeachable comic icon, to say nothing of how Ira tees up a he’s not so bad after all epiphany so hamhanded that it feels well beneath even this movie. This movie, which anchors Reef’s climactic breakthrough to his enlightened decision to stop googling himself. So it goes in a film about the freedom of not letting other people determine your self-worth. I can only hope that Jonah Hill doesn’t read the reviews for his latest work. 

Grade: C-

“Outcome” will be available to stream on Apple TV starting Friday, April 10.

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