In “Outcome,” Keanu Reeves plays a washed-up movie star who has been a noxious narcissist and addict — in private. For years, his team has been protecting his public persona as the nicest guy in Hollywood.
But the second part mostly feels like a limply added asterisk, as if the film, directed by Jonah Hill, realized halfway through that it had to explain its miscast of Reeves as a notorious jerk. That’s a big enough misfire, but it’s just the first in “Outcome,” a film that is shot like a fever dream and written like a puckish remake of “Jay Kelly.”
The bad boy in question is Reef Hawk (Reeves), once a child actor who became the world’s biggest movie star. But his public image obscured a drug addiction and party lifestyle that he’s been sobering up from for the past five years. All of this is explained to death — the film’s dialogue is largely expositional back story disguised as unsharpened jokes. When Reef goes on a private apology tour — hoping to make amends, but mostly to find out who is extorting him with a mysterious damning video — each visit reads like recitations of the film’s synopsis from a new angle.
Reeves isn’t able to rise above the material, but he’s not really given much to begin with; most of the film consists of its eclectic cast (Cameron Diaz as the best friend; Martin Scorsese as the former manager) talking at Reeves while he sits in dejected silence until he finally lashes out in a stilted, histrionic fit. The most extreme case is Hill, who plays Reef’s crisis lawyer, and seems to be doing a misguided twist on Tom Cruise’s demented executive in “Tropic Thunder.”
“Outcome” is an altogether bizarre turn from Hill as a director: His previous films (“Mid90s,” “Stutz”) were, even amid some stylistic cribbing, clearly borne out of a personal, considered worldview. Here he’s made a slapdash satire of modern celebrity culture that is awkward where it wants to be acerbic and clumsily maudlin where it wants to be meaningful.
The strangest swerve is in its cinematography. Where Hill’s other works had a visual identity, this one looks, in fits, like Technicolor on acid. Meanwhile, every other scene seems to be bathed in the glare of an artificial sunset, and a quarter of the film takes place on a simple Malibu beach patio that appears to have been shot via green screen.
It’s streaming filler in which its big names, including the composer Jon Brion, are trapped. Leave it, amusingly, to Scorsese to be the only one to make it out unscathed, elevating notions of wistful regret and the weariness of show business — the things that the film wants to be about — into something real, if only for a scene.
Outcome Rated R for language throughout and sexual references. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Apple TV.
The post ‘Outcome’ Review: A Washed-Up Star’s Apology Tour appeared first on New York Times.
