(courtesy IMP Awards)
The poster is technicolour promising. The cast dizzylingly impressive. And the premise?
Well, who wouldn’t want to watch a movie about a relatively newly sober A-list star who discovers that in his decidedly drug and alcohol-addled years that he upset a metric ton of people and now has to apologise to them all lest a reputation-trashing video find its way out to the highest bidder.
The thing about Outcome though is that despite the appealingly trashy behind-the-scenes Hollywood exposé, the star power in front and behind the camera – the film is directed and co-written (with Ezra Woods) by Jonah Hill – and some hugely clever lines, it ultimately ends up fizzling into nothing.
Which is a real pity because as ideas for a movie go, this one’s a corker.
Reef Hawk (Keanu Reeves who excels in the role) has been a star for more than four decades, after a preternatural appearance as a singer on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson sees him quickly become a much-loved star and cultural icon.
But that’s the public persona and behind all the gloss and smiles and PR campaigns into squeaky clean overdrive, Hawk is a complete and utter douche and the people he has pissed off is legion which is not a problem is all your skeletons are securely locked in a tightly held closet.
Alas, one of Hawk’s skeletons has flown the coop, and the actor finds himself, after a call from his narcissistically overblown crisis lawyer, Ira Slitz (Jonah Hill), trying to work out who could hate him enough to release a damning video into the feral damning chaos of the dog-eat-dog 24/7 digital news cycle.
Sober for five years, Hawk is a far nicer, more caring version of himself, but that counts for nothing if the video gets out and so, with the help of close friends since high school, Kyle (Cameron Diaz) and Xander (Matt Bomer), who could do with an apology from their friend since he’s about to be on a “Sorry!” roll, Hawk attempts to repair a multitude of broken relationships.
Some people are more forgiving than others.
Take Hawk’s old manager, Richie “Red” Rodriguez (Marti Scorsese) who was fired by Hawk just as he hit the bigtime; surprisingly Richie is actually quite forgiving, philosophically accepting that he’s simply the stepping stone to the kinds of managers his one-time child stars need when they grow up.
He has grievances of course, but in a scene which has some real heartfelt momentum and which provides a nice stepdown from the frantic word-snapping frenzy of the rest of Outcome, he and Hawk reconcile as the star realises he has inflicted some significant hurt on many of the people who made his career.
There are a variety of other apology scenes in the movie, some of which go Hawk’s way, some of which manifestly do not, but all of them, to varying degrees, carry some real emotional weight, even if they begin to feel a little lined up like emotionally manipulative dominos by the end.
In this respect, Outcome mostly excels, thanks largely to some stellar performances by actors in extended cameos like Scorsese but also Reeves who beautifully brings to life someone grappling for the first, searingly epiphanic time that they have been a complete and utter a**ehole.
Reeves bring a real repentant gravity to these scenes, and while it takes him a whole lot longer to apologise to his two hilariously vacuous but not unfeeling besties, who still love him despite all the crap he has rained down upon them over the years, he is a man who comes to realise it’s not enough to be sober and that he has to atone as best as he can for the many egregious things he did while he was far from the zen master he is now.
For all of its ballsy, try-hard dialogue, which aims for intelligent high parody but which never really hits the mark, or at least not enough times to make the rare moments of clever dialogue punch their way out of the mediocre word clouds surrounding them, Outcome really only shines when it actually wears its heart on its sleeve.
It doesn’t always execute this well either but with much of the humour falling flat, or no doubt flatter than Hill and Woods intended – it’s clear from how artfully it’s written, that the two writers were aiming for dazzlingly clever and not intermittently amusing – it’s the quieter, more reflective scenes that save this black comedy from box office hell.
Even so, while there are some inspired scenes and moments of quietly affecting brilliance, Outcome ultimately sinks beneath the weight of its thwarted ambition.
It wants to be so much and it fails to be much of any of it, its lofty parodic intent crashing down to earth and rendering what could have been an hilariously excoriating takedown of the vapidities and pointlessness of much of what passes for substance in Hollywood into something that feels curiously inert.
Hawk does grow as a character, and it’s his journey that gives Outcome an unexpectedly profound emotional anchor, but it’s not enough to make up for the crassness and silliness of a screenplay which wants energetic buzz and comedically rich skewering but which ends up feeling like sketch comedy that’s gone on far too long (which is quite an achievement for a movie that’s only 84 minutes long, a veritable blip on the cinematic radar when compared to its 2-3.5 hour counterparts).
Ultimately, while some of the characters absolutely come alive, and some of the scenes seize your heart with their authentic pain and incipient healing, Outcome never really feels like a whole piece of storytelling, its lofty ambitions to SAY SOMETHING falling prey to an inability to reconcile flippant jokes and emotional veracity, which leave it feeling like a collection of set pieces stitched together for a movie-length story which dares to reach for the Hollywood stars but which ends up somewhere down in auditions hell, never to be seen again.