KEANU REEVES BEING CANCELLED? IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN FUNNIER THAN THIS
Jonah Hill’s pungent show-business satire, about a beloved movie star (Keanu Reeves) bracing for a potentially career-threatening scandal to break, offers a timely skewering of cancel culture in all its hypocrisy and mindlessness. Had it been a bit better – and, ideally, a lot funnier – Outcome might have been one of the year’s most valuable films. As it is, it has a weird, half-finished vibe, with a lumpy, repetitive structure, a bizarre colour palette that resembles an exploding Tango Ice Blast machine, and too many scenes that wear on well beyond their natural usefulness.
Though it was shot two years ago and has presumably been kicked around extensively in the edit suite since, it still feels three or four versions away from the moment its thesis finally clicks.
Reeves plays Reef Hawk, a sort of Keanu-Tom Cruise hybrid who has spent the last four decades cultivating an image as one of the movie business’s foremost nice guys. A recent slump into heroin addiction, from which he was rescued by two long-term civilian friends – played by Cameron Diaz (underused) and Matt Bomer (the opposite) – was successfully smuggled under the media’s radar.
But Hollywood crisis lawyer Ira Spitz (played by Hill, who is also the director and co-writer) has heard tell of an incriminating video that’s about to hit the internet: the nature of its content is initially unknown, but allegedly explosive.
So Ira proposes a two-pronged defence: Reef should apologise in person to everyone he might have wronged in his career, while assembling a crack team of social justice image-launderers to guide him through the maelstrom ahead. (In a strong background gag, Ira’s office is adorned with portraits of happy clients: Kanye West, the Clintons, Kevin Spacey.)
Hill gives himself some punchy lines, but his abrasive comic style, which runs on collective gasps and squirms, doesn’t play as well in the lonelier, sofa-bound medium of streaming.
Meanwhile, Reeves doesn’t have to do much but look wounded as old friends and associates inform him he isn’t (or at least wasn’t) quite the nice guy he might like to think. Martin Scorsese has an extended cameo – very extended – as his hapless ex-agent, while Drew Barrymore plays herself, gamely if annoyingly, when Reef decides a live TV interview is the best way to “get ahead of the scandal”.
What Outcome gets just right is the nature of the video itself, which is eventually revealed as less scandalous than just a bit sad and human – though exactly the sort of sad and human that can be spun as scandalous by anyone who cares to. As closing arguments go, it’s astute and well made, in a film that otherwise rarely qualifies as either.
On Apple TV now
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2026-04-10T05:00:51Z
