Watched this last night and it was ok I guess, but I know I'll forget about it in a couple of days. As much as I like Jared Leto he is totally miscast IMO. I just didn't really buy him as some psychotic badass and what's even less convincing is the fact that this film supposedly takes place in 1950's Japan. The only parts I did enjoy were mostly the violent/gory bits which were quite gruesome at times, but that's about it.

C+

The Outsider

This is actually a decent film. It looks boring on the outside because they did a lazy job of marketing the film, but if you like Japanese yakuza culture it's a faithful addition to the genre. It is more cinematic than Kitano's mob films, but that lends itself well to the period. Set in the 1950s, it centers on Nick (Leto), an American prisoner of war who is eventually released and enters the criminal underworld for one of the two big families in Osaka, the Shiromatsu clan. The other is the Seizu. Anyway, as is expected in this type of film, a rivalry escalates and is, by the end, settled. Nick knocks up his boss's sister, the mesmerizing Shiori Kutsuna, and kills the traitor within his clan. He also kills Emile Hirsch -- Patrick Bateman style, in a similar way to his own execution -- who is in it for all of 3 minutes.

The Outsider is a slow two hours, but it is never boring. It is buoyed by its frequent violence and mobster inner-workings, fear and paranoia. It has a slightly neon-infused style, which is expressed visually and aurally. Jared Leto would not be my first choice to play Nick, but by the end I'd gotten used to it.

B

Wow, this is bad. Mostly due to a completely miscast Leto I didn't find this film working on any level. A 2-hour slog that I wish I hadn't started watching. I'm not sure why they decided to make the film as it ended up, but it's bleak, slow-paced, predictable and without excitement. Leto's love interest Miyu is nice looking though, and Kiyoshi, Leto's Yakuza brother out acts the lead with ease. The film is choppy, and while there's such a wealth in Japanese and yakuza culture I believe, I couldn't anything of interest back in this. One example illustrating it's badness is a continuity mishap where Leto had two fingers chopped off and was wearing a bandage from there on, but then a scene after the fingers are intact while buttoning up a shirt. And about Leto, I don't remember not liking him in other films and would consider him a good actor before this, but he's just so bad in this. A razzie performance, in a dull writen, poorly executed film.

F

It is too cultured for you. Skyscraper is more your pace.

Yep, spot on. The most recent bad film I'd seen was ocean's 8, and that had slightly more going for it too.

You're turning into a real critic these days. The Outsider is an easy target. It features Jared Leto on the wrong side of his career best, to some degree it's a Netflix dump, and most of all nobody saw it. Let's sharpen our blades! But it's actually a fine underrated film.

Hehe, I can just not find a way to not hate this.