Critic Reviews

Just far enough off the well-worn mob movie path to be worth a look, even if — like too much on Netflix — you feel the need to bail and see what else is available before it bleeds out.

The film is subsumed by the unshakable sense that Jared Leto is intended to make Martin Zandvliet's take on the yakuza underworld more palatable for American audiences.

It takes extremely familiar plot points and plays them straight, adding nothing new except the premise - a white American joining the Yakuza - which ultimately has very little to do with how the story unfolds. The film might be a functional crime drama but it’s an incredibly unremarkable one.

Asano and the rest of the Japanese cast provide baseline credibility, but they can’t generate excitement from this morass of clichés.

The Outsider is a slick copy of multiple, much-better films and TV series. It's so well-polished it's practically featureless.

As the story bloats to two hours by mistaking itself for an epic, The Outsider falls into a pit of boredom somewhere between the white savior complex of Tom Cruise in “The Last Samurai” and the much slicker kills by Alain Delon in “Le Samourai.”

The more this film begs to be told from the inside out, the more Zandvliet shoots it from the outside in. It’s enough to make you wish he hadn’t shot it at all.

It’s clichéd, distant, afraid to truly immerse itself in anything but long looks, but at least it looks good. And that’s that.

Merging standard gangster movie clichés of both the Japanese and American variety, The Outsider only manages to be ultra-violent and ultra-dull simultaneously.

Leto, with his whispery dialogue and complete lack of emotional range, fails to register on any level. While the film itself feels straight out of a Robert McKee seminar, as each twist and turn is telegraphed so blatantly, that it’s hard to see what Leto, who can be a good actor when he’s not too busy going all “method,” saw in it.