The Outsider Review: 3 Ups & 7 Downs

3. The Terrible Romantic Subplot

Because it's a generic gangster flick, of course there has to be an arbitrary romantic subplot, in which Nick hooks up with Miyu (Shiori Kutsuna), the beautiful sister of Kiyoshi (Tadanobu Asano), the Yakuza he saves from death in the film's opening scene.

Of course, the hero has to be banging his pal's sister, because why not? It's an eye-rollingly predictable route for a movie like this to go, and it sure doesn't help that Miyu doesn't really get any agency or character development of her own (nor do any of the movie's other sparsely-populated women, in fact).

Miyu's just an object to generate a plot point, and even more so than the rest of the narrative, this aside feels patronisingly cliched.