Throughout the 1990s, in his capacity as writer-director-editor-star — and that’s not all the hyphenates for an artist who has also dabbled in painting, magazine columns, regular TV-panel appearances and music recordings — Takeshi Kitano specialized in yakuza films that juxtapose the serene with the ultraviolent.
For example, in perhaps his best-known film, 1997’s Fireworks (HANA-BI), Kitano plays a cop who can tenderly attend to his leukemia-stricken wife in one scene and jam a pair of chopsticks into a gangster’s eye the next. The effect is jarring, to say the least, but it serves as a forceful reminder that death can come abruptly, without announcing itself, especially for men in this line of work.
Kitano fans have waited a decade since his last gangster film, the peculiar 2000 Japanese-American hybrid Brother, and the lull has been uniquely frustrating at times, as Kitano drifted into self-conscious Felliniesque experiments that walked his ego through a hall of mirrors.
The good news about Outrage, his grisly return to the genre, is that Kitano doesn’t have to shake the rust off — his impeccable compositions and clean, minimalist sound design are still calibrated for maximum impact. Even as dozens of bodies pile up, each act of violence feels as bracing as the sound of a gunshot ripping through the night air.
The question of why Kitano has retreated to the yakuza film, however, turns out to be a little more ambiguous. Much like 13 Assassins, the deliriously entertaining samurai riff released by Kitano’s countryman Takashi Miike earlier this year, Outrage considers old-school values of honor and loyalty with a cockeyed irreverence. Just as Miike’s samurai are frequently more venal and opportunistic than tradition dictates, Kitano’s gangsters are bound by such tissue-thin allegiances that the very notion of trust becomes a running joke. Trouble is, that one joke — and the many stylish deaths that support it — are nearly all Outrage has to offer.
