The Outsider

There was some promise in this film. But I have to say it got buried under poor writing, unimaginative cinematography, and a heavy-handed approach to film-making and storytelling.

Leto performed well, given the fact they handed him an impossible character. One which is supposed to connect with the audience on an emotional level, while also being a detached psychopathic killer. Believe it or not, there is a way to do this engagingly and 'correctly'. Leon the Professional comes to mind. They didn't do that here.

The overly-long transition scenes were a poor attempt at pacing. The acting rarely managed to deliver the goods, and the ending was trite and unimpressive. However, they clearly splurged on the scoring which was a welcome surprise. It's a Japanese lovefest all the way around, giving us all the the things traditionally associated with the country. But while I appreciate paying homage to an incredibly unique and beautiful culture, I don't think staining it with the horrific crimes of a small subset of the population was entirely appropriate.

Bottom line? I don't think this movie is worth your time. And I'm sorry to say that. It really had some potential, it was so unrealized.

The outline plot of this movie, and the fact that it had Craig Fairbrass in a starring role made me think this had the ingredients of a fun, action movie so I looked forward to this with much anticipation of a well spent hour and a half. I am not one for being too petty and analysing a movie and I'm sure many movie fans will spot something such as poor acting before I would.

However, there was so many elements of this film. That were below par, I just felt they had to be mentioned.

I was disappointed in the performance of the lead male, Craig Fairbrass.

He did not seem convincing, and his lines simply just did not seem natural.

In addition to this, the editing and sound were very poor along with the picture quality.

I gave this 4 out of 10 and I was possibly being a little generous.

I went to see this movie because of the recognizable names of Shannon Elisabeth, Jason Patrick, and James Caan, but looking back at it, I'm not sure why. There was a time when having all three in a movie would draw a bigger crowd, but I'm not sure if all their 15 minutes of fame ever overlapped with each other. The movie is about a father who finds out his daughter's dead and goes to LA to ID a body that turns out not to be his daughter. When I read this description I assumed given the actors evolved that James Caan was the dad, Shannon Elisabeth was the daughter, and Jason Patrick had something to do with her going missing, but instead all three top names play mostly back seat drivers to some British actor behind the wheel who's most likely a bigger draw in the UK than he is here. The movie is very genetic and bland and kind of goes fully by the numbers for an action flick with nothing really sticking out to impress me. Although I did love James Caan in it.

This could have been a really good film but we struggled to hear the whole film. The English accent of the main character was not brilliant and the West Coast US accent of many of the actors meant it really difficult to hear individual words. We went through all the changes of sound on our system - even turned off the surround sound in case this made a difference, but each the voices were mumbled and muffled. it was a case of guess the words the whole way through. Have to say though, that I have to nominate Craig Fairbrass for a better Jack Reacher than Tom Cruise. I hope Lee Childs etc decide to change the actor for the next film

You know the story/drill here, it'll be hardly surprising how this will develop. Recently there was another movie called "Prince" which had Bruce Willis in it (well sort of), but the real funny thing is that Jason Patric was in that movie too. He had a different role than that he has in this one, but just the fact that he'd be in such similar movies alone is kind of crazy.

The action scenes are decent, though nothing to get too excited about. James Caan is great as always, even if his role is pretty paper thin, he makes the most of it. It's very simple as stated before and acting from other is not really something to look forward to exactly. Without Caan I'd given this max a 4/10