Outcome, 2026.
Directed by Jonah Hill.
Starring Keanu Reeves, Jonah Hill, Cameron Diaz, Matt Bomer, Susan Lucci, Laverne Cox, David Spade, Martin Scorsese, Atsuko Okatsuka, Roy Wood Jr., Kaia Gerber, Ivy Wolk, Welker White, Drew Barrymore, Cary Christopher, Lovensky Jean-Baptiste, Shola Adewusi, Nikolai Nikolaeff, T.C. Amos IV, Rose Bianco, Paul Bartholomew, Stefanie Yunger, Angela Bullock, Cuete Yeska, Jordyn Michaela, Nicolas Noblitt, Jude Friedman, Dylan Forsman, and Van Jones.
SYNOPSIS:
Follows Hollywood star Reef as he is forced to confront his problems and atone for his past after being threatened by a bizarre video footage from his past.
In a brilliant, meta piece of casting, Keanu Reeves might be on the verge of getting canceled in co-writer/director/co-lead Jonah Hill’s (collaborating with Ezra Woods on the screenplay) clunky and tonally confused Hollywood satire, Outcome. That’s not to say the John Wick star is playing himself, but rather fictional Hollywood superstar Reef Hawk (rest assured, if I had any interview time with Jonah Hill, my first question would be how the hell he landed on that unique name) who has gone through something similar to the Robert Downey Jr. arc, recovering from a life-threatening heroin addiction at one point only to become an even larger celebrity, and one much more gracious with his fans.
The kick is that when it comes to Reef’s crude longtime best friends (Matt Bomer and Cameron Diaz), the low level manager who first discovered him (Martin Scorsese, almost certainly returning a favor from the filmmaker’s hilarious turn in The Wolf of Wall Street) whom he left high and dry and never checked in on following garnering that fame, or past partners (Welker White), Reef is a bit self absorbed and has taken them for granted. In the case of his reality-TV-star mother (Susan Lucci), the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
As mentioned up top, the joke is not lost that in real life, Keanu Reeves appears to be about as humble and generous as Hollywood celebrities get, perhaps right there alongside Tom Hanks (the latter is not in the film, but his name does come up in a throwaway line implying with humor that everyone in this town is rotten in some shape or form). With the emergence of an unknown video brought to Reef’s attention, alongside subsequent blackmail, everything he has worked for and earned could come home to roost, depending on the severity of what the anonymous person could get him canceled for. Reef himself has no idea what this could possibly be.
Expanding on that meta premise is the presence of Jonah Hill as celebrity crisis lawyer Ira Slitz, playing into Jewish stereotypes while bringing a crass, almost Judd Apatow flavor of comedy to the proceedings that regularly doesn’t land, simultaneously sinking some of the film’s dramatic ambitions that sometimes exist within the same scene, but are more prevalent during the third act. That meta aspect comes from Jonah Hill having been slightly cancelled in his own right; it wasn’t for anything severe, but it garnered enough icky press (the situation had something to do with a toxic amount of low self-esteem weaponized with jealousy and doubt against his model partner at the time), which is also the kind that would lead someone to make such a try-hard cynical movie as this about performative celebrities and cancel culture. Obviously, the existence of this film is proof that the drama has gone away (perhaps he genuinely has mentally bettered himself and is using this as a vessel to vent out thoughts), and he still has some friends.
The real crippling issue is that Outcome seems to be taking itself too seriously for a movie asking the question of “what if Keanu Reeves was about to have some dirty laundry aired out on the Internet that could end his career”. It doesn’t help that Jonah Hill has limited imagination about what to do with this premise, reducing it to a series of oversaturated exterior scenes, with Reef running around town, attempting to apologize to everyone he has ever wronged.
To be fair, these conversations are engaging to an extent, but they also create a repetitive structure that’s cinematically flat for a movie that already struggles to reach the 75-minute mark without the end credits. To the surprise of no one, supporting players such as Martin Scorsese are giving it their all in a film that is up for debate on whether it’s deserved; the sheer amount of big-name veterans here, some of whom don’t act much anymore, is elevating this far beyond what it was on the page.
Hollywood probably does deserve a kick in the ass regarding everything Outcome is trying to get at, regarding not only the highs and lows of fame, but the disparity between the elite and the working class, or that most famous people likely do have a crisis team of lawyers; the film’s one terrific dark gag is a council assembled to bury whatever comes up for Reef, where each lawyer, whether they be a woman or other minority, is comfortable covering up crimes against their own kind for top dollar. Everything else in Outcome either feels a bit too forced, misguided, uneven in tone, flailing humor, or narratively lost, wasting the meta aspects until one no longer cares about the outcome.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
