An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since it was for ages already in my queue, I thought I might as well finally watch it. Well, I thought it was rather hard to judge the damned thing after all. Indeed, on one hand, I really liked the concept, the whole thing looked really slick and Jared Leto was a perfect choice to play the lead. On the other hand, there is no doubt that it was another half-baked Netflix production. The funny thing is that, since this movie has been released, the Netflix productions have actually been even more disappointing. I mean, this one was at least definitely ambitious. Indeed, it was a cool neo-noir film taking place in Japan in the 50’s so there was definitely some potential. Unfortunately, in spite a generous running time of 2 hrs, nothing much noteworthy really happened. As a result, the whole thing felt like style over substance. Basically, the whole idea was that the guy did end up working for the Yakuza but it never became really fascinating at all. Eventually, his motivation for working for them and their motivations for them to hiring him were always rather murky (basically, it would be cool for a Netflix flick, it’s the only reason I can think of). Concerning Jared Leto, he did look the part but, unfortunately, he really struggled to do anything interesting with his character, except looking mysterious. Sure, you could say that he was not really helped by the fact that we didn’t get to learn much about his character but I don’t think it was the issue here. Indeed, at least, not thanks to his stiff and boring performance, but thanks to this lack of background information, his character became automatically more impenetrable and more intriguing. The best example was the short (and rather useless) scenes involving Emile Hirsch which did give some information about this gaijin but this extra information had very little added value after all and it could have been easily removed. However, even though it was cool that they committed to the concept by hiring a bunch of Japanese actors who always spoke Japanese together, none of these characters was developed whatsoever which felt like a missed opportunity. It was also rather pathetic that the main character fell in love with the only Japanese woman with some lines (at least, she was really cute). Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch, even if it was completely forgettable like most of Netflix features. 

6/10