A Jared Leto Yakuza Netflix Movie??? There's No Way The Outsider Is Terrible!

The Outsider

Director - Martin Zandvliet

Writer - Andrew Baldwin

Cast - Jared Leto, Tadanobu Asano, Shiori Kutsuna, Min Tanaka, Kippei Shiina

It takes a total of 10 minutes before a characters commits (or more accurately, stages committing) harakiri in The Outsider, a journey into the heart of the Yakuza shortly after the destruction of World War II and our guide is Jared Leto. Following in the sacred footsteps of brave white men like Tom Cruise (The Last Samurai) and Sir Daniel Day-Lewis (The Last of the Mohicans), Jared Leto boldly plays a White man assimilating himself almost perfectly into a non-white culture. Of course, Cruise and Day-Lewis are mere amateurs compared to the method acting genius of Mr. Leto (or Leto-san because you gotta respect the craft). Who else would mail used condoms to his costars as an act of getting into character, wear blacked-out contact lenses to truly experience blindness, wax his entire body to win an Oscar for playing a woman or eat melted ice cream with olive oil and soy sauce so as to gain the necessary weight for a film literally nobody saw. Jared Leto is the truest thespian of our times.

 Sadly I have not been able to confirm that Leto actually moved to Japan and joined the Yakuza to prepare for this role but hiding your crimes from public knowledge would be a skill he would have picked up for a film wherein the only non-Yakuza character (Emile Hirsch) he interacts with, he murders after about 2 minutes. Now, far be it for me to question the craft of a visionary genius, but perhaps Leto should have studied acting techniques that would allow him to properly emote and convey a character because he does literally none of that here. Aiming for the suave, effortless cool of Alain Delon (Le Samourai) he instead comes across as the dweeby kid in high school who wore what the cool kids wore but clearly didn't belong with them. He moves from scenes to scene staring at nothing, saying nothing and generally just doing nothing. It seems like his character might have had a bunch of dialogue and motivation in the script but Leto, in his infinite wisdom, decided to do absolutely none of it on set leading to a bland exercise in aping all the popular tropes of gangster films.

Hey, remember when all the gangster told jokes to each other and generally busted balls like in Goodfellas and The Sopranos? Well, Jared Leto's got the world's lamest "Guy Walks Into a Bar" joke. Remember the tragic romance like in The Godfather and Le Samourai? Well Jared Leto is going to seduce his boss' (Asano) sister (Kutsuna) with no dialogue and buildup. Literally nothing. She is introduced, he is told to drive her home, they arrive and literally the first thing they say to each other is an exchange of goodbyes before she decides that she just has to sleep with him and then cut to him sitting in the corner of her bedroom, full dressed, watching her sleep. One good times montage later and she's pregnant and the entire Yakuza is falling apart. How about the revered old man in charge of the entire mob like The Godfather? Well of course The Outsider has that (Tanaka).

Andrew Baldwin's script is a collection of cliches surrounding vast voids of nothing. Like, literal vast voids of nothing. Even basic stuff like the time period or why Jared Leto is in Japan are only vaguely doled out after several scenes of nothing happening except for characters looking at each other before one of them gets murdered. Somehow, somebody wrote a 1000 word summary of the plot on Wikipedia which is impressive because I doubt the script has more than 100 words in it. Ok, that's a poor exaggeration, there's plenty of dialogue between the various orders of the Yakuza doing generic gangster posturing and power grabbing. It's just hard to care about anything when it's all cliches and Jared Leto's blank look of infinite blackness.

The Outsider is exactly what you expected it to be. Nobody expects the words Jared Leto Yakuza Netflix Movie to lead to a quality piece of filmmaking (except maybe stable genius Jared Leto) but even with lowered expectations it couldn't even be halfway entertaining. When its plot wasn't dictated by the events of other (much better) gangster movies it fell back on the most basic set up-fall out structure wherein Jared Leto has Yubitsume explained to him solely so he can do it about 10 minutes later. Those expecting a strong performance from Leto should perhaps consider supporting actors who don't sexually harass their coworkers because they can't think of any other way to get into character. This film didn't even give me the one thing I wanted from it, a Jared Leto death scene. The Outsider isn't the work film Netflix has made (because Fairy Lives still don't matter today) but it probably shouldn't be watched by anybody.

Schurmann Score - 1/10