Great film ruined by unfair negative hype and expectations
I'm not saying this is a masterpiece, but it is not NEARLY as bad as some of the threads or lists here suggest. I honestly thought it was really great. Hayden Christensen was an intense, dark lead basically playing the character everyone WANTED Anakin Skywalker to be (Ironic because nobody is giving him a second chance to try and pull that off anymore), Liu Yifei brings a lot of passion and strength to her performance as Lian, the fight scenes are UNBELIEVABLY impressive, the romance is well developed and the characters actually have depth. I LOVE how they didn't sugarcoat Jacob to make him just a "good person who did bad things." He's a straight up psychopath at the beginning and even at the end, they imply redemption may not be possible for a man like him. The best he can do is just pursue a life of charity and help others learn from his example. That's actually a brilliant twist on this kind of story. Cage's performance was weird, but it was no worse than anything Johnny Depp's done in the past 11 years and bad accent aside, he fit the role of a *beep* bonkers former vet suffering from the worst PTSD imaginable. The only really big problem is the cuts and editing, which are pretty distracting and pointless, but it's no worse than anything from The Hunger Games. It felt a lot more like a Western in terms of story (The mysterious, washed outsider with a dark past must save a group of outcasts from a powerful tyrant.) which I thought worked interestingly with the Medieval setting.
4.6? REALLY? People liked SAUSAGE PARTY more than this? I mean, everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but from an unbiased perspective, this should at least be in the early 5s.
The negativity and pre-hate this movie got makes Feigbusters look like The Force Awakens. MONTHS before this movie came out, people were giving this movie crap, and it really frustrates me. If people went in with an open mind and hated it, that'd be fine with me, but that wasn't the case. I've seen like 12 threads here about how terrible people thought this looked because of the two leads. (Who are not even close to "bad actors" by the way, as their previous accolades and nominations for the Academy and Golden Globes show) Guess what? If you go into a movie WANTING to hate it, you're gonna hate it! And that's what I feel happened with Outcast. It's the ultimate example of preconceptions screwing a really not bad film.