Jonah Hill’s new film, “Outcome,” now streaming on Apple TV, is a caustic comedy set in Hollywood Babylon. Its protagonist is a star about to go supernova for all the wrong reasons. A former child star who was introduced to the world tap-dancing on the “Tonight Show,” Reef Hawk (Keanu Reeves) is famous for being the greatest actor of his generation, and also for being a nice guy. His reputation precedes him on Google, where his daily habit of compulsively searching his own name yields only pristine results.
Reef’s best friends, Kyle (Cameron Diaz) and Xander (Matt Bomer), like to razz him about his man-of-the-people act, but there are also skeletons in his walk-in closet. Early in the film, Reef’s crisis lawyer, Ira (played by Hill himself as a noxious caricature of ethical flexibility), informs him that an unknown party is threatening to go public with an incriminating video. The vibes are so bad that Ira has to make absolutely certain that his client didn’t actually kill somebody and cover it up.
Reef isn’t a killer, but there are people in his circle with enough beef to keep the lights on at McDonald’s. The question is, who’s grinding an axe big enough to publicly decapitate him. While Reef sets out to find his blackmailer — an odyssey involving co-stars, colleagues, family members and former lovers — Ira convenes a group of damage-control specialists in a conference room adorned with portraits of Kanye West and the Clintons. There, they brainstorm ways to repackage their pariah-in-waiting as the victim of cancel culture run amok.
With its up-to-the-minute skewering of showbiz rituals and deep bench of celebrity cast members — Martin Scorsese, meet Susan Lucci — “Outcome” can’t help but resemble an extended episode of “The Studio.” To its credit, it’s considerably darker than Seth Rogen’s Emmy-winning exercise in nibbling the hand that feeds, and more soulful too. The latter owes mostly to Reeves’s excellent acting in a role that splits the difference between self-parody and thespian stretching.
On the one hand, Reef is very much a stand-in for the guy playing him; you can imagine him wielding a pistol like John Wick. But he’s also supposedly a great actor, with two Oscars to his credit, while Reeves has never even gotten to utter the lie that, really, it’s an honour just to have been nominated.
For a while there in the 1990s, it was conventional wisdom among critics that Reeves was a lousy actor: “From his robotic delivery, you’d never guess he’s meant to be a flesh-and-blood man,” snarked a New York Times reviewer appraising “Johnny Mnemonic.” The cheap shots fired at his performance on stage in a mid-‘90s Winnipeg production of “Hamlet” were the work of critics happy to have a big target; they also belied the fact that Reeves had been pretty credible reciting Shakespeare alongside Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh in “Much Ado About Nothing.”
Meanwhile, the “Sad Keanu” memes that proliferated online in 2010 after a paparazzo snapped a shot of the actor nursing a sandwich on a park bench were buttressed by the authentic melancholy of his acting in films like “River’s Edge” and “My Own Private Idaho.” In the latter, he held his own against no less than River Phoenix, although only Phoenix earned comparisons to James Dean.
The slightly stilted quality of Reeves’s acting style — the way he often seems to be dazed and confused onscreen — can be a feature as well as a bug; it’s a question of how it’s used by directors. Reeves got brutal reviews for attempting an English accent in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” but his bewilderment in that film served to make Gary Oldman’s immortal bloodsucker that much scarier and more sophisticated.
The same dynamic explains Reeves’s paradoxical effectiveness in the redolently cheesy late-’90s supernatural thriller “The Devil’s Advocate,” which cast him as a cocky, callow wannabe alpha male up against Al Pacino’s effortlessly Mephistophelian mentor — hardly a fair fight, but then that’s the point of the movie.
Pacino was 57 when he did his satanic elder statesman shtick in “The Devil’s Advocate” — four years younger than Reeves in “Outcome,” which mines its headliner’s veteran status for pathos. Reeves’s agelessness has been a talking point for decades (he’d be great in a modern remake of “The Picture of Dorian Gray”), and even at 61, there’s something perpetually adolescent about his features and demeanour; for many fans, he’ll always be a teenage wastoid à la Ted “Theodore” Logan.
It’s a thin line between stoned and stoic, though, and Reeves’s everything-zen screen persona is hard to deny: the common denominator between the heroes of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “The Matrix” is their propensity to go slack-jawed and say “Whoa,” effectively turning Keanu into a mirror of his own adoring audience. For the record, he’s appeared in more interesting and memorable mainstream movies than many of his brand-name peers: “Dangerous Liaisons,” “Point Break,” “Speed,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “The Gift.” The John Wick series is probably the 21st century’s action franchise par excellence.
Reeves’s willingness to show his age in his appearances as John Wick suits the mythic-pulpy sensibility of the material (the movies have increasingly come to feel like victory laps around their own legacy).
“Outcome” is suffused with something slightly different: the feeling of an actor reckoning with the effect of decades under the microscope. The irony, of course, is that Reef’s carefully calculated Good Samaritan act is a riff on Reeves’s well-documented — and by all accounts authentic — menschiness: the stories about his propensity to donate generously to cancer research programs and arts education; the encomiums to his kindness by former co-stars and collaborators.
Hill’s instinct to deploy an actor routinely celebrated for his decency as an avatar of disingenuous image maintenance is clever, but it wouldn’t matter if Reeves weren’t so committed to the bit. “Outcome” is slight, but the performance has layers.
Whether or not Reef Hawk clears his name — or learns the power of finally saying sorry — is a source of suspense throughout the film, but Reeves has nothing to apologize for. His talent has been long since vindicated.
