Outcome

An overly familiar take on stardom and showbusiness, Outcome, Jonah Hill’s second narrative feature following 2018’s charming Mid90s, is a schizophrenic satire that flits between two incompatible strands. The first is a quiet character-study of Keanu Reeves’ superstar reckoning with his past behaviours. The second is a whackier, outrageous comedy of Hollywood shenanigans about averting career-ending catastrophe. Unfortunately, Hill never finds a way to accommodate both tones and the result delivers more whiplash than Damien Chazelle could dream of. In short, there is nothing here that isn’t done more sharply, funnily or with more resonance on The Studio.

Reeves is the improbably named 56-year-old Reef Hawk, a movie star for four decades who, like no other actor ever, has fronted three franchises but also won two Oscars. The beloved public persona masks a private pain, half a decade of drug and booze addiction that is finally in the rear-view mirror. Now ready to make his comeback, he is extorted to the tune of $15 million, threatened by the release of a video that will finish his career. On the advice of his improbably named crisis lawyer Ira Slitz (Hill), Reef begins an apology tour, asking for forgiveness from those he has hurt in his life with the underlying agenda of revealing the blackmailer.

The damage-limitation sequences deliver Outcome’s best moments. Reef’s meeting with his mother (Susan Lucci), who used his fame to catapult into The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills, is blistering, the pair revisiting the past while also negotiating the demands of reality TV. In a different register, Reef’s reunion with former girlfriend Savannah (Welker White) is a scene of quiet pain, as the latter realises how much of her time was wasted.

But best of all is Reef’s catch-up with his childhood agent, the improbably named Red Rodriguez, superbly played by Martin Scorsese. A Broadway Danny Rose small-timer who works out of a bowling alley, Red feels abandoned by his clients (“the guy you leave if you do your job right”), and Scorsese nails that ache perfectly. It’s by far the most affecting performance of the whole film.

Which frankly isn’t saying much. For the bulk of the film is dominated by Reeves, always likeable but strangely vacuous, involved in crisis-management meetings that feel far too broad to land. Hill’s hyper-energised Slitz, all veneers and over-use of the word “bubbe”, is too much of a caricature to feel like he’s in the same film as Scorsese’s character, be it fielding calls from his clients (“Tom Hanks just body-slammed his housekeeper”) or assembling a council of war (Roy Wood Jr, Atsuko Okatsuka, Laverne Cox, and Annie Hamilton) to fight Reef’s corner. Reef is also propped up by two high-school friends played by Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer that embody the film’s twin poles, by turns shrill and unfunny, then intimate and poignant.

Hill and co-writer Ezra Woods circle the piping-hot pitfalls of modern celebrity — cancel culture, separating the art from the artist, victim capitalism, the tell-all interview (with Drew Barrymore) — but don’t really have anything to say about them. Hill’s filmmaking also doesn’t ring true, the score too insistent, Los Angeles looking like it was shot on The Mandalorian’s Volume. Ultimately Outcome needed a more refined, truthful director. Maybe the Hill who turned up for Mid90s.