It’s been a while since such a well-mounted cast failed to meet the moment in an ensemble comedy quite like Jonah Hill’s Outcome, the actor’s sophomore outing into fiction filmmaking after his breakout directorial debut, Mid90s. That movie was (very) well received. This one will get the polar opposite reaction. It’s painfully unfunny, its central conceit seems dated and regressive, and some of the most exciting performers working today are stuck delivering lines that will make you cringe with total embarrassment. It makes you wonder why they even signed onto the movie in the first place.
Here’s the movie’s only funny joke, a visual gag that sees actor Reef Hawk (Keanu Reeves) enter the conference room of his crisis lawyer, Ira Slitz (played by Jonah Hill), where photos of Kanye West, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Kevin Spacey are largely framed in the space. That got a chuckle out of me, because Reef’s lawyer – and his “dream team” – all represent terrible people with more than simple skeletons in their closet. Reef, we learn, is one of the most revered actors of our time, on the same pedestal as Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington (according to Van Jones, in a self-referential cameo as himself).
However, he had to step away for five years to deal with issues he didn’t want to make public. Ira dealt with all media-related aspects, while his best friends, Kyle (Cameron Diaz, in another failed return to acting after last year’s horrendous Back in Action) and Xander (Matt Bomer, understated but effective) tended to him. As he plans his comeback to Hollywood, Reef receives an urgent call from Ira, who warns that a potentially compromising video could be made public if a ransom isn’t paid within 48 hours.
In trying to figure out who the blackmailer might be, Reef goes on an apology tour and meets past acquaintances whom he’s hurt in an attempt to make amends. The only scene that’s actively good is the one where the actor apologizes to his former agent, Richie “Red” Rodriguez, played by Martin Scorsese. The veteran filmmaker brings much-needed humanity and regret to his soulful performance as a washed-up Hollywood agent who was once the talk of the town but is now riddled with debt and has to shift to other professional endeavors to make ends meet. It’s the sole scene in which Hill and Ezra Woods’ screenplay has a semblance of life, because Scorsese’s performance feels immensely textured, able to read between the lines and deeply touch Reef’s psyche before he realizes what he must do to atone for his past sins.
Many hail Scorsese’s films as the gospel, which they mostly are, but continually underrate his talents as an actor. How he’s able to carry decades of pain in a single scene that lingers with you long after he’s disappeared from the picture is a feat that few performers have. However, I strongly believe that working with such consummate actors – Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joe Pesci, to name a few – has given him clues on how to shape any performance he undertakes in front of the camera.
It’s such a shame that he’s the only one who seemingly cares about the character he plays here, because everyone else falls relatively flat. Bomer’s Xander has one great moment of vulnerability, where he tells Reef about how he felt about a past encounter, and the two open themselves up, but every other actor misunderstands the assignment, or doesn’t have anything interesting to work with. Not even Reeves can salvage his protagonist with one of the greatest movie character names of all time (it’s fun to repeat REEF HAWK ad nauseam), because the screenplay is so paper-thin that it barely allows him anything for the audience to latch onto Reef’s personal journey of self-actualization.
He gets a couple of funny lines, sure, because Reeves knows how to do comedy, but the movie does no one any favors. Hill’s sense of humor is so juvenile and dated that one wonders how a movie like this could be released almost 10 years after the #MeToo movement. His jokes are nothing but references that, even a decade ago, wouldn’t have felt original. Now they’re just lazy and boring, filled with stereotypes that feel embarrassingly problematic for a humorist who still seems to be perpetually stuck in 2007, where Superbad gave Hill his breakout role as a comedian and actor.
Throughout Outcome’s brief 76-minute runtime (without credits, with a few credits scenes, it’s 83 minutes) chuckled at times, but that was about it. I learned nothing about Reef Hawk as a character that might change my perception of who he could become when he’s perpetually perceived as a bad dude by everyone he meets. However, since we don’t know much about him other than he’s made past mistakes, nothing else connects, and the entire proposition, while fleeting, falls flat. Here’s hoping Hill’s second go-around at studio comedies this year, with Cut Off, will be much more inspired than whatever the hell this direct-to-streaming movie became. Who knows, it might not have been the director’s desired outcome, but we’ll probably never find out…
Outcome is now streaming on Apple TV.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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