Outcome debuts on Apple TV on April 10.
With so many to choose from in the past decades, there have certainly been plenty of genuinely great straight-to-streaming movies at this point. Hey, one of them just won Best Animated Feature Film at the Academy Awards, after all! But by and large, there’s a reason the overwhelming impression many of us have of these movies is that they frequently boast big stars and often come from big filmmakers, and yet are often some of their most forgettable work; unfortunately, Apple TV’s Outcome is yet another example of this.
Jonah Hill directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Ezra Woods in what feels like a notable stumble following Hill’s strong and assured directorial debut, Mid90s. Boasting his most amusing character name since Johnny Utah, Keanu Reeves stars as Reef Hawk, a longtime movie star in danger of a major downfall when an anonymous source blackmails him, threatening to release a mysterious video containing Reef doing… something. The blackmailer doesn’t give details, leading Reef to panic about what it might be and how much it could derail his career.
The main thrust of the movie deals with Reef – following the instructions of his Hollywood crisis lawyer, Ira (Hill) – going through his past and tracking down people who might have a vendetta against him in order to give them an apology, while really attempting to find out who the blackmailer is. Early on, Reef is surprised to learn the list of people who dislike him is quite long, and that he’s failed to live up to the ‘nice guy’ persona the public believes. And after that, well, there’s not a lot of there there, as the film follows a predictable path with Reef’s quest leading him to look at mistakes he’s made and people he should have treated better. This would be fine if the material felt genuinely emotional and cathartic, but it’s all mostly rather surface level.
Sure, it’s amusing to cast Reeves – an actor who’s been famous since the 1980s and has a reputation as a very kind person – as an actor who’s been famous since the 1980s and has a reputation as a very kind person but actually has not been that. And there are some easy chuckles provided by using actual images from Reeves’ past – like his teen headshots or 1990s press line photos – to illustrate Reef’s past. But the film feels rather toothless and vapid in its approach, nor is it ever consistently funny, despite a few good one-liners here and there.
We meet Reef after he’s been five years sober from a heroin addiction and having moved past those very dark times, which he assumes this video will dredge up. The depiction of the Reef we meet in the present is that he is a pretty good guy! He’s a little annoyed by fans approaching him and takes his friends for granted more than he should, but there’s no on-screen reveal of him being the huge a-hole we are then told he once was over and over, diminishing any impact that a redemption arc might have.
And yes, Outcome absolutely does that thing that streaming movies and series have been called out for, where it repeats information multiple times, presumably because there’s an assumption that the audience at home is half-watching and might have missed something. Along with Hill, the largest supporting roles in the film are played by Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer as Reef’s lifelong friends going back to high school. How is this information conveyed? By awkwardly inserting into the dialogue – at least three different times in the first 20 minutes – that these three characters went to high school together!
The same goes for the multiple mentions of Reef being five years sober, a plot point which also leads to one of the ways the film doesn’t feel genuine about how Hollywood works, despite Hill very much having seen the inner workings of Hollywood during his own impressive career. Reef has somehow kept it a secret that he ever had what is described as a rather long-term drug addiction, feeling it would ruin his reputation and turn fans against him – something which is never challenged. Wouldn’t at least one person in his orbit point out, “Okay, but you’re clean and sober now, and have you heard of this guy named Robert Downey Jr. (to name one example)? Because he’s managed to have the public on his side just fine despite a very rocky past.”
Diaz feels pretty wasted in her role, though Bomer at least gets one of the film’s stronger dramatic scenes, as his character delves into why he’s loyal to Reef. Other familiar faces pop up throughout the film, including David Spade, Drew Barrymore (playing herself), and soap opera royalty Susan Lucci. Lucci is fun in her single scene as Reef’s mom, getting to throw out a bunch of F-bombs and play into a diva persona – she’s become one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills – that feels like a more successful twist on her real-life All My Children-derived fame than what’s being attempted with Reeves here. Oh, and freaking Martin Scorsese pops up too as Reef’s childhood manager, doing a solid for Hill, who worked with him on Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.
As Reef, Reeves is fine, even as it’s also amusing that his trademark halting delivery has become increasingly similar to that of William Shatner and Adam West as he gets older, with even more pauses in the middle of his sentences. But again, the movie doesn’t let us actually see the uglier side of Reef that we keep hearing about in order to register much of a change occurring in him. That would have given Reeves more to do and explore in a way he’d no doubt embrace as an actor; just look at when he played that absolutely awful abusive racist in Sam Raimi’s The Gift!
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