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After failing to impress as the Joker in “Suicide Squad” and being inarguably the weakest part of “Blade Runner 2049”, it’s safe to say Oscar winner Jared Leto had a rough time in Hollywood. To add to the list, he recently missed the mark with “The Outsider” which is now on Netflix. Unlike the colorful performances he is best known for, Leto attempts to deliver a bare bones, emotionally stunted portrayal of a gang member who is a former WWII soldier in 1954 Yokohama, Japan and gets entangled in the yakuza’s grisly world. But, at two hours long, it inflates into a bloated self-important epic which results in profound tedium somewhere between the white savior complex of Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai and the much more stylish gunning down of Alain Delon in Le Samurai.
By the first world war, Leto’s Nick had already been drafted into the army. He later finds himself in the depths of the yakuza after rescuing a poorly burned yakuza guy named Kiyoshi who offers him a place to stay. Nick seems to be in a Japanese prison for reasons unknown to us at the moment, but gladly accepts this new life with very little resistance.
It doesn’t take much time for Leto to masterfully robotic beat down opponents with their typewriters, or John Wick style shoot them, all thanks to the Shiramatsu gang’s aging boss (Tin Manaka) who plays a father figure’s role in his life. Leto is relatively more established in the Yakuza world now as Nick and has started to develop a romantic relationship with Kiyoshi’s sister, Miyo (Shioli Kutsuna), which now and then makes him an ‘outsider.’\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ Leto has the best view possible to see the rising tensions between the competing Seizu gang and the Shiramatsu gang. Each side has a different reason for the conflict: one side claims a territory, the other side a joint investment in radios. With their boredom, they might introduce some incredibly violent kills, but these passages offer little relief from their dullness. The genre fans however might notice that director Martin Zandvliet does not have a good eye for action here. He blunt slices and flattens bursts of violence leaving them explosive devoid their violence.
“The Outsider” is astonishingly careless in its brutishness aside from the part in which Nick and the others grotesquely and ceremonially sever a few of their fingers in one of “The Outsider’s” emotionless renditions of yakuza customs.
“Jared Leto in a yakuza drama” hardly makes sense, but somehow, this is not even close to being the film’s biggest blunder. It is not exactly the borderline absurdity of dogmatically placing a white American into an all-Japanese male setting that is grievous, but how this film does so little with Nick’s particular heritage to justify the mortifying notion. He does, in the beginning, possess what is certainly an odd and curiously intriguing bone of a fish out of water, but he is mostly let go of that hook, save for the sight of him being frequently talked down to in English. “The Outsider” could be about any stereotypical Japanese individual who has no clue how deep the yakuza tunnel goes. But then , “The Outsider” would lose to be a yakuza drama with Jared Leto in the lead, which is pretty much all this film strives to be.
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