Keanu Reeves is reliably charming in Outcome, a new Apple TV comedy-drama about a beloved movie star, Reef Hawk, who’s making a comeback after several years of secret heroin addiction and a long rehab process. He finds out he’s being blackmailed with a mysterious video that will supposedly wreck his career when it’s released on the internet, and he sets out to meet the people he’s wronged to see if he can figure out who the blackmailer is.

But Reeves’s sweet, laid-back amiability isn’t enough to make this satirical inside-Hollywood tale of redemption work. It’s all been done far better in other movies. Central to the problem is Jonah Hill, who cowrote the underwhelming script with Ezra Woods. He also directs and gives himself far too much screen time as Hawk’s obnoxious crisis lawyer, Ira Slitz. It’s supposed to be one of those hilarious portraits of the crass Hollywood monsters who often make it to the top — Tom Cruise’s brilliant Les Grossman portrayal in Tropic Thunder set the gold standard — but Ira Stilz is a braying weirdo who’s merely tiresome, never funny. One of his questionable jokes, yelled out while he’s standing in front of a wall-sized portrait of one of his supposed clients, Kanye West, is about how the only demographic it’s acceptable to hate in the United States now is Jews.

Which is news to me. This not-too-veiled reference to a global uptick in antisemitism, which is always tied by the US media to rising criticism of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians and similarly merciless war on Lebanon, is typical of the Hill and Woods script. It takes a scattershot approach to subjects that are complex and serious if you stop to consider them for more than a minute, which it never does.

Outcome also features Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer as Reef’s best friends from his school days who’ve been with him through thick and thin. And there are cameo performances by Susan Lucci, Martin Scorsese, David Spade, Laverne Cox, Kaia Jordan Gerber, Drew Barrymore, and Van Jones as himself. No doubt, everybody tries, but there’s not much to work with.

Lucci has a colorful scene as Reef Hawk’s mother Dinah, a TV reality show star who insists she and Reef have their heartfelt talk on camera for her show, because, as she puts it, they’re both “truffle piggies for fame.” And Scorsese does a creditable job as Reef’s first agent, a small-timer who represents talented kids and runs a bowling alley on the side. He guided Reef’s career as far as an appearance on the Johnny Carson show as a singing, tap-dancing kid full of showbiz moxie. This appearance sets Reef on the path to fame and fortune, after which he drops his old manager like a hot brick and never calls him again. In short, Reef’s life has been ruled by narcissistic selfishness. As Reef’s long-suffering ex-girlfriend (Welker White) tells him, “You’re not a good person.”

It’s odd, the film’s insistence that Reef has no idea what he could possibly have done that would destroy his reputation as the nicest star, though it’s a necessary part of the premise if he’s going to have to go interview family members, significant others, friends, and colleagues to find out who hates him enough to blackmail him. Reef’s preoccupation through this ordeal is repeatedly checking social media and googling his own name to find out whether he’s still popular or if he’s now reviled because the video — with its content still unknown — has been posted. It’s basic to the film’s take that everything in the entertainment industry has changed because of the internet and, presumably, cancel culture. Reef’s lawyer has to explain to him that now nobody is safe, even Reef Hawk, who’s always “been so careful” about not being filmed or photographed while committing transgressions.

There’s no ignoring the film’s relationship to Jonah Hill’s own 2023 mini-scandal that supposedly threatened to cancel his career, because he’s constantly referring to it in interviews promoting Outcome. It seems Hill’s ex-girlfriend, surfer Sarah Brady, accused him of manipulative behavior. She released screenshots of unverified texts from Hill that used therapy terms in insisting on “boundaries” crucial to him. They amounted to policing her behavior, with stipulations such as no “surfing with men,” no posting pictures “in a bathing suit,” and no “modeling” or “friendships with women who are in unstable places from your wild recent past beyond getting lunch of a coffee or something respectful.”’

Without commenting on the alleged texts, Hill withdrew from the public eye, got married, and had children. Outcome is his first project since. The catalyst for Outcome, Hill says, is this: “When all this cancel culture stuff was happening, I thought, ‘Who’s the person that people would be the most bummed about getting canceled?’ It would be Keanu Reeves.”

It’s quite a cynical move, actually, casting Keanu Reeves, the king of likability who’s so inclined to avoid offending anyone; there are dozens of endearing photos of him mutually embracing famous women in which he’s got both hands held open wide away from any bodily contact so as not to risk the slightest possibility of touching anyone inappropriately. The effect of Reeves on the character is to make the viewer sure Reef Hawk couldn’t have done anything that bad. That is, unless you know about the sins of omission, which Hawk has racked up all his life as he neglects his friends and loved ones and forgets to be grateful to anybody because he’s so self-centered. Reef is no racist spewing slurs like Mel Gibson, and he’s no sexual predator like Kevin Spacey. The movie pulls every possible punch when it finally comes to what’s actually revealed about Reef Hawk.

In interviews, Hill discusses at length how he understands Reef Hawk’s plight because he himself is a victim of paranoia-inducing internet attacks: “To me, the whole movie’s an allegory for social media,” said Hill, which just goes to show he doesn’t know what “allegory” means. The movie’s plot literally deals with the pernicious way social media dominates people’s lives today, especially the lives of those poor defenseless movie stars.

If you’re seeking funnier entertainment than this movie offers, try reading the Jonah Hill interview in which he puts on full display his aching self-pity and vast sense of grievance. It’s so overwhelming, ever since people were mean to him on social media, he’s convinced his tragedy is now the universal contemporary experience. His interlocutor, Martin Scorsese, keeps trying to point out that the fraught nature of movie celebrity has always been this way, even if certain aspects of it are intensified by technology. Basically, it’s still “the nature of building up a god and goddess and then wanting to tear them down,” says Scorsese.

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

And I admit I’m happy to contribute to the tearing down of Jonah Hill by saying his movie Outcome stinks and you should skip it altogether.