Joel on Film

Reef Hawk, the protagonist of Outcome, is a handsome and universally beloved star, having begun his career in childhood, held his own as the face of multiple cinematic franchises, and won—not once, but twice—the most prestigious award a movie actor can receive on the public stage that is all of Hollywood. Take away that last one and maybe extend the timeframe of the first, and you also have Keanu Reeves, who began acting in his youth and is now essentially an internet meme for how good-natured and genuinely kind he is in person and in his profession. The challenge for writer/director Jonah Hill is to add one more quality to that intimidating list of them: a number of reasons to be disliked by everyone who actually knows him.

Reeves plays Reef as entirely aloof about that extra quality until it might be far, far too late to fix it, and it’s a strong, slightly satirized, wholly credible performance in a movie that is simply too slight and too short to make anything of it. Well, that’s not entirely true, since the movie and its lead actor make the most of digging deep into Reef himself, finding what makes him tick and trying to locate that elusive quality wherein, it seems, everyone else just sees an egotistical cad who garnered instant and unearned sympathy for kicking a drug addiction. Since the movie is entirely about Reef in a way that means its deep-digging does its job, it’s sort of unfortunate to have to report that the movie doesn’t really come together in a satisfying way.

Maybe it’s a case of a film giving us too little of a good thing, mashed together into a broad satire about Hollywood ego that might be a bit too much. Reeves is so good that it seems Hill, in his own performance as Reef’s lawyer and fixer Ira Slitz (no one has a “normal” name here, of course), doesn’t really know where to put his energy in a role that boils down to a single joke. Ira is particularly skilled at intervening in the bad fortunes of “cancelled” celebrities (one in particular, a troubled rapper who recently revealed himself to be sympathetic to far-right causes, is prominently displayed in photographic form overlooking Ira’s conference room), which eventually comes in handy here.

The “plot” is all about Reef’s attempts to rehabilitate his own image—both in the public, when a video depicting some problematic behavior and an ancient movie clip involving some strange business with an Asian character make the rounds, and in private, where the specters of his pompous ambitions and his substance abuse still linger. His best friends Kyle (Cameron Diaz) and Zander (Matt Bomer), who have known him since childhood, have fewer and fewer reasons to plaster smiles on their faces. His first and best manager Red (Martin Scorsese) has had a life of one professional disappointment followed by another, but the cursed streak began when Reef distanced himself.

All of this is generally heartfelt but, because it’s also in a movie meant to shock us with the lengths to which it’ll go for an uncomfortable laugh, slightly hollow. The satirical point is never more obvious than in an extended and largely fabricated sequence in which Reef finally gets the chance to confront his mother Dinah (Susan Lucci), who is clearly a frightening stage-mother type. All the emotionalism displayed by Reef here is fabricated, though, because cameras are filming their reunion and Dinah wants several more takes of her “emotional” response.

The material involving Reef’s potential “cancellation” is a little more probing, because the realization of his celebrity status (which arrives in the form of bad timing for Drew Barrymore, who cameos as a foul-mouthed version of herself on the set of her talk show) does meaningfully trickle down to some realizations about his personal life. It involves some blackmailing from a character, played by David Spade, who has set up house in the condominium next door. He also visits an ex-girlfriend, played by Welker White, who provides some much-needed insight into his character.

The result is well-meaning, occasionally touching and, crucially, quite disjointed in what it wants to say about Reef and famous actors and, through Hill’s visually striking but tonally discordant machinations, how it wants to say those things. Outcome does try to dig deep and nearly does, but these are ultimately shallow observations.

Rating: **½ (out of ****)