Keanu Reeves is reliably charming in Outcome, a new Apple TV comedy-drama about a beloved movie star, Reef Hawk, who’s making a comeback after several years of secret heroin addiction and a long rehab process. He finds out he’s being blackmailed with a mysterious video that will supposedly wreck his career when it’s released on the internet, and he sets out to meet the people he’s wronged to see if he can figure out who the blackmailer is.
But Reeves’s sweet, laid-back amiability isn’t enough to make this satirical inside-Hollywood tale of redemption work. It’s all been done far better in other movies. Central to the problem is Jonah Hill, who cowrote the underwhelming script with Ezra Woods. He also directs and gives himself far too much screen time as Hawk’s obnoxious crisis lawyer, Ira Slitz. It’s supposed to be one of those hilarious portraits of the crass Hollywood monsters who often make it to the top — Tom Cruise’s brilliant Les Grossman portrayal in Tropic Thunder set the gold standard — but Ira Stilz is a braying weirdo who’s merely tiresome, never funny. One of his questionable jokes, yelled out while he’s standing in front of a wall-sized portrait of one of his supposed clients, Kanye West, is about how the only demographic it’s acceptable to hate in the United States now is Jews.
Which is news to me. This not-too-veiled reference to a global uptick in antisemitism, which is always tied by the US media to rising criticism of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians and similarly merciless war on Lebanon, is typical of the Hill and Woods script. It takes a scattershot approach to subjects that are complex and serious if you stop to consider them for more than a minute, which it never does.
Outcome also features Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer as Reef’s best friends from his school days who’ve been with him through thick and thin. And there are cameo performances by Susan Lucci, Martin Scorsese, David Spade, Laverne Cox,…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
