The Outsider
Film Review by David Cirone
Slickly-produced with flawless costume and set design, Netflix’s The Outsider is an emotionally empty, white-man fantasy that’s hard to watch with any degree of personal investment. It’s great eye candy as long as you turn off your desire for anything beyond surface characterization and the hope for dramatic surprise.
With a stacked deck of impressive actors — including Tadanobu Asano and Kippei Shiina — The Outsider could have accomplished so much more, but its predictable, shallow plot, and soulless direction weigh it down with no hope of ever surfacing for air.
Ex-U.S. Army captain Nick (Jared Leto) is doing time in an Osaka prison for “something” and performs a good deed by saving Kiyoshi (Asano) from a hit by a rival gang. For his help, Kiyoshi rewards him with a job with the Shiromatsu clan after his release. The script’s checkboxes get ticked in quick succession after that: Nick performs a violent job no one else can (check), gets bumped up to more important jobs (check), starts a forbidden affair with Kiyoshi’s beautiful sister (check), becomes a favorite of the clan’s boss (check), gets involved in the rival clan war, discovers a traitor, risks personal sacrifice to avenge his brothers (check check check)…
If you’ve seen Black Rain, The Last Samurai, and Goodfellas, you’re in real familiar territory. Nick should be dead a hundred different ways — he’s in that prison a long, long time with lots of pissed-off Yakuza staring at him, and he’s just as unpopular with his Yakuza enemies on the outside — but his plot armor is operating at full power. For an American who doesn’t speak Japanese and who faked his death to duck court martial from his home country, Nick seems to insist on calling attention to himself with public violence and letting his blue American eyes do the work for him. He spends a lot of time in exclusive Yakuza clubs wearing just his white T-shirt (yes, he has suits at home), situations which would be embarrassing for everyone in a world where outward displays of strength and status are essential, but director Martin Zandvliet sticks with this type of flat symbolism for Nick’s outsider status.
The Outsider (trailer)
The Outsider treats Nick as special just because he’s the lone white man in his environment, but he has no special skills, no demonstrated need to belong to a brotherhood, and puts zero effort into understanding his newly-adopted culture. He’s a tourist putting on the outward trappings of a Japanese life, and he’s tolerated by his Japanese associates despite their own life and death stakes.
Great performances in mixed English/Japanese by Asano and Shiina – who take the film to the next level ever-so-briefly in their shared dramatic scenes – is the one reason to watch The Outsider. Shiina’s mid-film monologue about his childhood and his bitter response to romantic rejection, along with Asano’s subtle, dark discussion with Nick about the consequences of his sister’s choices, are solid gold moments.
The Outsider tries hard to add texture to its portrayal of 1950’s Japan – draped in drab browns and greens, stacked with whitewall tires, thin neckties, sumo wrestling matches, kabuki theater, and lush, lingering shots of ornate Yakuza tattoos – but there’s not much substance to put on this visual stage. The oh-so-many steadicam shots of intense-looking men walking through the narrow alleys of post-war Osaka don’t add dramatic tension to this film, they just make it seem all the more tired.
