★½ (1½ out of 4)
Martin Scorsese is performance perfection as a washed-up talent manager with a conscience still in working order. And that, I’m afraid, is the last good thing I have to say about “Outcome” (bad title btw), directed, co-written and co-starring Jonah Hill whose gifts in those capacities are curiously MIA in this sad sack excuse of a Hollywood satire. The outcome of “Outcome” with critics and audiences is still to be written, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
Given Hill’s other effort at filmmaking, 2018’s nostalgic wonder “Mid90s,” my expectations were high indeed. But “Outcome,” starring Keanu Reeves as Reef Hawk, a movie star everyone likes (like Keanu) but who, unlike Keanu, has been hiding a monster of a heroin habit, never comes close to mining the comic possibilities of its premise.
Jonah Hill’s satire of fame in the age of TMZ sinks Keanu Reeves and an all-star cast in a muddle of jokes creaky enough to send to assisted living.
Reeves plays Reef as “sad-faced Keanu,” a meme that built some traction a few years back. Reef’s sins have been covered up for years by his crisis lawyer Ira Slitz, acted by a nearly unrecognizable Hill in a bald head and gray beard. Hill—a two-time Oscar nominee for “Moneyball” and “The Wolf of Wall Street”—plays Ira with just the right note of sleaze on sleaze, but hardly any variations in between.
Now after five years of recovery done in secret, Reef is advised by Ira to embark on a comeback apology tour to suss out the bad actor who’s now blackmailing him with a video allegedly brimming over with incriminating evidence of his misdeeds.
The fact that movie star problems don’t amount to a hill of beans with audiences can be recently seen in the box office indifference to George Clooney’s “Jay Kelly.” It’s telling that this A-list project is going straight to streaming on Apple with no stop in theaters. I’d love to say that the naysayers are wrong and shout that “Outcome” totally deserves a good outcome. But lying is futile when the damning evidence is out there for all to see.
As a filmmaker, Hill seems to be telling us that the "TMZification" of celebrity is a plague that can’t be cured by having Reef man of the people-ing with the common folk. That theme has been done to death and beyond and Hill doesn’t have the juice to spark a resurrection.
Reef’s best friends, Kyle (Cameron Diaz) and Xander (Matt Bomer), rally to his side, but they’re pretty much alone out there and also disgruntled that Reef has long ago stopped treating them as friends. I’d be disgruntled if I were Diaz and Bomer since Hill has basically given them nothing of interest to play.
The rest of “Outcome” is basically a lineup of victims of Reef’s gigantic ego, including his ex (Welker White), his reality star mother, nicely teased by soap queen Susan Lucci, and Scorsese as the manager he ditched in his child-star days. Drew Barrymore even shows up as herself to indicate that Hill has leaned on his famous friends to sprinkle his second film as a director with stardust. Sadly, nothing can hide the emptiness at the film’s core.
Is “Outcome” addressing Hill’s own problems with cancel culture? Maybe, given accusations of emotional abuse against him from his former partner, surfer Susan Brady, and his bizarro friendship as a Jew with antisemitic rapper Kayne West. A framed photo of Kanye with Ira, along with another of him Kevin Spacey, add more inside jokes that are fun for a while, but the center of the movie, where its heart should be, doesn’t hold.
Reeves, a genuine nice guy with a sharp knack for absurd humor (He recently starred on Broadway in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”), never quite wraps his sensibility around playing Reef. The actor’s rare awkwardness in the role adds to the feeling that something has been off about “Outcome” from the get-go.
At a scant 82 minutes, “Outcome” still feels long, filled with setups for jokes that rarely land and messages about the dangers of fame that feel creaky enough to send to assisted living. File “Outcome” under “missed opportunity” and the hope that Hill will get well soon.