Share and Follow
Is Keanu Reeves drawn to working with comedians who have faced controversy? It seems that way, as he has recently starred in Jonah Hill’s film Outcome and worked on Good Fortune with Aziz Ansari the previous year. Although neither Hill nor Ansari has been formally charged with any crimes, both have faced public scrutiny over allegations of misconduct. These personal challenges seem to have influenced their latest projects, which delve into themes of morality, happiness, and complex human relationships.
While discussing Outcome, it’s difficult to separate the film from Hill’s real-life controversies, as the plot seems to parallel his experiences. In the movie, Reeves portrays Reef Hawk, a renowned actor whose name is mentioned alongside legends like Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington. After stepping away from the spotlight to overcome a heroin addiction—a secret known only to his closest friends—Reef is poised for a comeback when his lawyer Ira, played by Hill, informs him of a blackmail threat involving a compromising video. Although Reef is unaware of the video’s contents, he embarks on a journey to apologize to people from his past, hoping to resolve old grievances and identify his extortionist.
Reeves is perfectly cast as the enigmatic Reef Hawk. Much like the character, Reeves is a celebrated star, having headlined blockbuster franchises such as The Matrix and John Wick. Unlike Reef, however, Reeves has yet to win an Oscar. Still, his genuine humility and unique persona allow him to bring depth to the role, avoiding a mere parody of himself. Hill, who co-wrote the film with Ezra Woods, taps into modern anxieties about how one’s public persona—Reef’s, in this case, being a universally beloved figure—can be shattered by darker truths. Reef’s mix of ego and charm is evident when he subtly prompts an interviewer to mention his Oscars, then gracefully dismisses the oversight to appear humble.
With a premise that forces Reef to face his past while interacting with a cast of colorful characters, including his amusing pals played by Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer, Outcome initially promises a blend of character exploration and Hollywood satire. However, over its concise 77-minute runtime, the film veers into territory resembling a therapeutic exercise for Hill, reflecting on an impressive career that has recently faced turbulence.
Hill’s rise to fame began with the comedic gem Superbad in 2007. From the start, his career has spanned a spectrum, from working with esteemed directors like Martin Scorsese and the Coen Brothers to starring in broad comedies like 21 Jump Street. He’s earned two Oscar nominations and made his directorial debut with the coming-of-age film Mid90s. Hill’s ability to oscillate between comedy and drama is evident, but with Outcome, he seems to be navigating the personal and professional complexities of his life through the lens of cinema.
In the 2020s, though, Hill’s work has seemed wobblier, perhaps thrown out of balance by how few comedies are made now, compared to when he was coming up. To follow up Mid90s, He made a whole-ass documentary about his therapist, which, while well-regarded, in retrospect seems like a red flag. Even something closer to his seeming comfort zone like You People, placing him in a socially conscious comedy of manners opposite Eddie Murphy, seems vaguely self-aggrandizing in its insistence on making his character more of an earnest bumbler with a genuine and entirely legitimate interest in urban culture, rather than a figure of fun.
Outcome, to its credit, wants to extend similar grace to all of its characters. We’re prepared for Reef to encounter a bunch of comically bitter or unpleasant people on his apology tour; instead, they’re all pretty empathetic, from his low-rent former manager (Martin Scorsese!) operating out of a bowling alley to Reef’s reality-show fixture mom (Susan Lucci) to his longtime on-and-off ex-girlfriend (Welker White). They all get thoughtful monologues about how Reef hurt them, though the movie stays pretty vague about what, precisely, he did that made him such a bad person before and during his addiction years.
This is where the casting of Reeves might undermine the movie: It’s simply hard to picture this version of him as all that monstrous, so without specific examples (and following a litany of questions from Ira covering the many heinous things he didn’t do), the movie isn’t convincing. Hill wants to be clear-eyed about Reef’s selfishness without making him truly bad – no spoilers, but the eventual unveiling of the video in question is beyond anticlimactic – which is both realistic and, in the context of Hill’s own public-relations snafus, a little easy.
The whole mess is encapsulated by Hill’s supporting but overbearing performance as Ira. He gives himself permission to be the more venal, outrageous, ridiculous one as Ira brags about his crisis management skills, purportedly satirizing Hollywood figures Hill must have encountered in real life. (His firm’s office has handsome portraits of Kanye West, Kevin Spacey, and the Clintons on its walls; hard to tell if those are examples of his acumen in action, or a comment about his ultimate failures.) He also stops the movie cold to riff, particularly in a long and pointless scene where he introduces a bunch of other crisis management experts and says inappropriate stuff about and around them. And then in what is framed as a mini twist, he turns out to be… also a doting father to his wheelchair-bound son! It’s a ham-handed way of teaching a lesson about how everyone deserves some degree of empathy, not to mention a convenient sidestepping of genuine, probing questions about personal morality.
Perhaps more importantly in the context of these 77 minutes in particular, the laughs in Outcome largely dry up after the first half-hour or so. Reeves is touching in his reflective register, but he is both funnier and more affecting in Good Fortune, playing a guardian angel whose earnest dimness gave him a kind of beatific grace. That movie felt overly simplistic at times, yet its downright philosophically knotty compared to the gesturing of Outcome. Moreso than Good Fortune, the movie that Outcome most resembles might be Judd Apatow’s Funny People, where Hill had a supporting role as one of several grasping, pathologically wisecracking stand-up comedians. (As it happens, it also features Ansari.)
In that movie, Adam Sandler played the Reeves role of the superstar who maintains an amiable public face while quietly behaving selfishly and living a lonely life behind closed doors as a result. The film is empathetic to Sandler’s character while also unsparing about his selfishness and lostness. For my money, it’s Apatow’s best film, one that feels thoroughly conflicted about what it means to want to make people laugh. By comparison, Outcome feels like a movie made in the midst of lostness, rather than safely in the aftermath. Hill gestures toward Hollywood satire – he clearly doesn’t feel ready to fully abandon comedy – yet for all of the celebrity-needling lines he feeds himself, and for all of its insistence that it’s about a deeply flawed and selfish man, the movie feels soft, even self-pitying at times. The movie obviously wouldn’t exist without Hill, which makes it a perverse feat that for much of the runtime, its writer-director feels like he’s standing in the way.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
Stream Outcome on Apple TV+