Outcome streaming movie: Jonah Hill litigates ‘cancel culture’ by weaponising good guy Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves is the star of Outcome, playing a character called Reef Hawke, a name that instantly evokes some of the iconic roles earlier in his career, those action do-gooders who were just so cool.

Reef Hawke is also cool, just like Reeves, and Outcome relies on the external goodwill built by Reeves over decades as one of Hollywood’s nice dudes.

Also just like Reeves, Reef is a movie star of the old-school kind – he gives very little away, doesn’t flaunt himself on social media, and his face and presence is enough to sell tickets.

He’s been taking a break for the past five years, ostensibly because he needed a time-out after working non-stop since he was a child actor, but in reality, it was to recover from a heroin addiction.

His team and his friends – two besties since high school, Kyle (Cameron Diaz) and Xander (Matt Bomer) – have been covering for him for years, but something has slipped through because there’s a compromising video of him in the ether.

The owner of that video is extorting Reef for money, but the star has no idea what it might show and who has it. Turns out, he’s pissed off a lot of people in his life, and his public reputation as a good guy doesn’t gel with who he really is.

Reeves’ casting is essential here but we already love him, and the default position is you’re on his side, despite what the film is telling you at the start, that even Reef’s own mother hates him.

There are moments when Reef is googling himself, panicked that this offending video has at any moment dropped, and the list of results reads exactly like what you would see if you searched Reeves’ name.

At one point, Reef is even referred to as the “City of Angels celeb”, just like Reeves, so Outcome is explicitly metatextually tying Reef to Reeves.

There’s a third layer to using meshing Reeves and Reef together, and that’s the real story behind Outcome. This isn’t a film about Reeves’ stardom, not really, because it’s really about Jonah Hill.

Hill co-wrote (with Ezra Woods), directed and has a supporting role in Outcome, and this is more about his own relationship to fame and cancellation/accountability – your preferred term reveals something about you.

This is Hill’s first proper project since he was semi-exiled in mid-2023 after a series of text messages between him and ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady was released by the latter when she accused him of “emotional abuse”.

Among the allegations from Brady, who dated Hill in 2021 and 2022, was that he attempted to control her behaviour, what she wore, what photos she could post and who she was friends while weaponising language used in the mental health field and therapy.

For example, Hill wrote to Brady that he required her to remove images of herself in a swimsuit from social media because they were his “boundaries for a romantic partnership”. He also said she couldn’t be friends with women “who are in unstable places”.

Hill has in the past been very open about his mental health struggles and even made a documentary about his therapist, Phil Stutz.

So, while Hill is in the film as a different character, it does feel like he’s exploiting Reeves’ nice guy persona for an onscreen avatar facing not the same but not dissimilar circumstances as what he went through.

Hill, in a Q&A with Martin Scorsese, who has a small part in Outcome as a talent agent, for Interview explained it as, “When all this cancel culture stuff was happening, I thought, ‘Who’s the one person that people would be the most bummed about getting cancelled?’. It would be Keanu Reeves.”

As far as social “crimes” go, Hill’s pales in comparison to other famous dirtbags, some of whom committed literal crimes. If it was more serious, you wouldn’t have the likes of Reeves, Scorsese, Diaz and Bomer signing up to work with him again so soon.

Compare that with Johnny Depp, who former co-star Charlize Theron so beautifully blanked at the Christian Dior show in Paris late last year. Penelope Cruz might be fine with sharing a credit with Depp on their next film, but many people still aren’t, and his recent and upcoming projects reflect that unease.

With Outcome, he’s attempting to engage with, if not litigate, what Hill perceives as “cancel culture” through this personification of a celebrity at risk of being called out for bad behaviour.

By not putting himself in the Reef role, Hill is able to distance himself from it by degrees, but all of his personal baggage matters.

The character he plays is named Ira Slitz, a crisis lawyer whose office is adorned with large black-and-white photographs of Kevin Spacey, the Clintons and Kanye West, the latter portrait looms large behind Ira as he stands at the top of his boardroom table.

Ira is abrasive and amoral – it’s only about negotiating and mitigating any fallout from his client. He assembles a brains-trust of lobby groups and representatives from activist organisations that could cover off most marginalised communities – Atsuko Okatsuka plays a woman from an Asian representation group, Laverne Cox as a feminist lawyer in the vein of Gloria Allred and Roy Wood Jr as a Jesse Jackson-esque stand-in.

Hill is commentating on the artificial managed-ness of these crisis scenarios, questioning the sincerity of any performance of contrition following a call for accountability.

In that interview with Scorsese, Hill bemoaned “cancel culture” and gossip as playing into the basest instincts of humans, that we like to build up gods and then knock them off their pedestal.

He said of his film, “It’s very much about how since the dawn of entertainment, since Fatty Arbuckle, there’s the entertainment of the hero soaring, the entertainment of them being knocked down, and then the entertainment of them rising from the ashes.

“But the truth is, modern entertainment is pretty much just tearing someone down.”

Hill is not entirely wrong. There seems to be in the present moment, an even more voracious appetite for schadenfreude fuelled by political and economic elites trying to scapegoat everyone else so you don’t notice that the root of most people’s problems are actually those telling you to point the finger at marginalised communities and poor people.

But Outcome isn’t a particularly sophisticated or nuanced take on cancel/accountability culture or Hill’s relationship to it.

If anything, the film’s sentimentality – shocker, Reef realises that the only people whose opinions really matter are those closest to him, and that he should be present for them instead of trying to chase the esteem of strangers – sidesteps all the stickier considerations.

If Hill is trying for a mea culpa moment, Outcome wasn’t it.

Outcome is streaming on Apple TV