Outrage
When
the Chairman (Soichiro Kitamura) of the ruling Sonno-kai family becomes
suspicious of clan chief Ikemoto (Jun Kunimura) and his friendship with rival
gangster Murase (Renji Ishibashi) and his clan, he orders Ikemoto to break off
contact and prove his loyalty.
Reluctant to dirty his own hands, Ikemoto turns to his loyal captain,
the enigmatic, taciturn Otomo (the director, billed as usual as Beat Takeshi)
for help.
A
tit-for-tat cycle of insult and humiliation between the two gangs soon escalates
however into bloody violence and retribution when Otomo goes too far, slashing
a rival’s face and one of his men is beaten to death in revenge. A bloody turf war ensues, the Chairman
manipulating Ikemoto, Murase and Otomo to his own ends, playing them off
against each other while the Chairman’s underboss Kato (Tomokazu Miura) looks
on in disgust and waits for a chance to make his move…
Reminiscent
of Alan (Scum) Clarke’s TV play Elephant and its never-ending series of
senseless, faceless, arbitrary violence, Outrage marks a return to the gangster
genre for Beat Takeshi (his last Yakuza movie being 2000’s Brother) after a decade of more
personal, self-indulgent projects.
Charting the internecine, almost Jacobean struggle for supremacy in
Tokyo’s underworld, Outrage doesn’t pull any punches.
Fingers
are lopped off in apology for minor insults. Faces are slashed, bodies stabbed, bones broken and
splintered. A chopstick is driven
into a victim’s ear. In a scene
that both parodies and ups the ante on Marathon Man, Otomo uses a dentist’s drill
to devastating effect on a helpless opponent’s teeth, lips and cheek. Gangsters are shot, stabbed, blown up
and, in one extreme case involving a car and a length of rope, virtually
decapitated, for little or no discernible reason.
Gone
is the elegiac, almost spiritual, tone of earlier works like Sonatine or Hana-Bi, Outrage is down, dirty and mean with
it, a nasty spiral of cross, double-cross and increasingly extreme violence as
outrage is heaped upon outrage, each act requiring punishment, the perpetrators
mere pawns in a game they don’t understand or even see, locked into their own
perverse, nihilistic lifestyle, their sense of honour and belief in their own
rigid, hierarchical, power structure chewing them up and spitting them out as
the bosses plot.
Deconstructing
and exposing as shallow the gangster lifestyle, Outrage feels like it’s probably
Takeshi Kitano’s last Yakuza movie as he stabs and buries alive the persona
he’s played throughout his career. Bleak, complex and cynical, it’s as powerful
and angry a piece of work as he’s ever produced but is ultimately unsatisfying,
a wearying cavalcade of brutality with little point. Which is probably the point.
David Watson
Writer/Director
Takeshi Kitano
Cast
Beat Takeshi, Keppei Shiina, Ryo Kase, Tomokazu Miura, Jun
Kunimura, Tetta Sugimoto, Takashi Tsukamoto, Hideo Nakano, Renji Ishibashi,
Fumiyo Kohinata, Soichiro Kitamura
Country
Japan
Running time
109 minutes
Year
2010
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