Gangster Season: Outrage (Dir Takeshi Kitano, 1h49m, 2010)

There are few figures in cinema like Takeshi Kitano-a one-man wrecking ball rolling across Japanese cinema, and popular culture with nigh unstoppable momentum, boasting a filmography, as both actor, and director, where he wreaks implacable violence and paints staggering beauty with equal power. Starting as a comedian, and upending the staid world of Japanese comedy with an often brutal and mocking precision, including his appearance as the Shogun of a castle stormed by hundreds of thousands of competitors in the now-legendary Takeshi's Castle, Kitano suddenly bursts into cinema. Appearing first in Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), as a brutal POW sergeant, and, whilst crestfallen by audiences laughing at his appearance, Kitano vows to continue playing serious characters, and, when the director of his next major film, Violent Cop, steps down due to sceduling commitments, so Kitano takes over, heavily reworking the film, and thus becomes a director for the first time.

What follows is a singular filmography, from films that leap from slow, Kurosawan takes, to explosions of often shocking violence like Boiling Point (1990), Brother (2000) and Sonatine (1993) to undeniably beautiful, romantically tinged films (often scored by Ghibli mainstay, Joe Hisaishi), A Scene at the Sea (1991), Hana-Bi (1997) and Dolls (2002), to a return to the brutal, perfectly inflicted slapstick of his comedian career, Getting Any (1995) and Takeshis'  (2005). All of this alongside Kitano's continued acting career, including such highs and lows as Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Battle Royale (2000), and being the best thing about 2015's Ghost in the Shell. This, of course, goes hand-in-hand with Kitano's continued adventures in television, and beyond, including making the downright bizarre Takeshi no Chōsenjō, a bizarre joke of a video game poking fun at the entire medium, and his cameo (as a barely fictionalised Kitano-esque gangster) in the grand finale to the Yakuza (Ryu Ga Gotoku) franchise.

To many, though, Kitano is the figurehead of modern yakuza cinema. This genre's growth grows from humble beginnings as Robin Hood style stories to heavy influence in the Post-War era from American Gangster films, to jitsuroku eiga (Actual Record) films, a quasi-documentary syle, often shot on nascent handheld cameras, most notably the spectacularly scaled Battle Without Honour or Humanity (1973). The late 80s and early 90s, as the actual yakuza begin to lose their foothold in Japan, takes the genre in the other direction, and onto the genre's preserve on home video, with the lurid and ultra-violent world of the yakuza brought to life by directors like Takeshi Miike, including Rainy Dog (1997).

Against all this, Kitano brings his brand of ultraviolence, bleak cirumstance, off-beat humour, and harsh, often cruel figures to the genre, revitalises it, and takes it into new, and exciting places. Nowhere is this better seen than in the 2010 film, Outrage, a brutally effective, bloodily effective return to mainstream film-making for Kitano after several more artistic films, in which Kitano plays a Yakuza henchman, a middle-man between the politicing bosses who jockey for power and the brutal and crude underlings, in the centre of a brutal turf-war both within, as the clan he is a member of erupts into civil war-and without, as they battle against other for turf.

We begin, though, not with the men in power, those who control the Yakuza family and who vie for power beneath their boss, Sekiuchi (Soichiro Kitamura), and his underlings, including Kato (Tomokazu Miura), and Ikemoto (Jun Kunimura), but with a pan across the collected cars of the family's multiple branches, including that under Ikemoto, headed by Otomo (Kitano); it's a perfect visual representation of that, despite the power being held in the banquet of its leaders, it is won with these hardened, and at points brutish men. It is this moment, though, as Kato holds back Ikemoto from leaving and warns him that his friendship with fellow-and rival-gang leader, Murase, has been noted. Kato issues Ikemoto with a simply order, bring Murase, who, unlike the majority of men in this film, is not affiliated with a clan, in-line, or face the consequences. Ikemoto immediately hands this to Otomo, who begins to plot their downfall.

What follows is the first of a series of escalating moments; one of Otomo's gang is shaken down in a nightclub belonging to Murase, and, eventually resigned to his fate, takes one of the nightclub staff back to pay him, only to entrap the hapless footsoldier, who is sent back with the cash in a deliberate attempt to start an all-out gang war between Murase and Ikemoto's clan. What tips it over the edge and into inevitably conflict is Otomo's plotting, demanding the money back, and the member of Murase's cla to be punished-the footsoldier does not appear, and his superior Kimura, after his apology, and attempt to cut off his own finger proves abortive, is promptly brutally attacked with a boxcutter in the first of many sudden explosions of violence orchestrated by the otherwise impassive Otomo.

From here, the violence explodes outward and spills into all-our conflict between Otomo and Ikemoto, and Murase's men-this leads from the staff-member who kickstarted the entire conflict being brutally beaten and left for dead outside Otomo's headquarters, to a brutal, and frankly sickeningly visceral scene in which Kitano's penchant for crossing the bounds of taste into ultraviolence becomes most obvious, with Otomo and his henchmen paying Murase a visit at the dentist turning brutal as Otomo attempts to scare the aging gangster into retirement by practically destroying his mouth, leaving him traumatised and nigh-voiceless for the rest of the film. It's hardly surprising that Kitano notes he worked backwards from the film's many brutal deaths, but the pure variety and that the film so often jolts into these moments of extreme violence keep you guessing exactly who will survive and who will die as the film's bodycount begins to spiral out of control.

For it is death, and loss of power that the film meditates upon-we see Otomo forced to carry out the mob war by his superiors, slowly stripped of agency as the war rages out of control, and reduced to a hired gun, brutally executing Murase and his men, and then his superior, Ikemoto, as his own gang are slowly winnowed down by the escalating violence-but moreover, Outrage critiques what the Yakuza are in modern Japan. We see Otomo's relationship with a former school-friend, now a detective, and a glimmer of just how corrupt the police are, we see his men kill with impunity, including a wince-inducing scene that sees a man stabbed in the ear with chopsticks to torture the information out of him, and we see an extended subplot, in which two of Otomo's men blackmail an entire African embassy and their ambassador into becoming part of an illegal gambling that eventually leads to him being threatened with a snake, and left to bury the body of the butchered Murase in the middle of nowhere.

Death haunts Outrage. Death has always haunted Kitano's cinema-and indeed Kitano himself-death, and the death of purpose; Kitano's gangsters are men at the end of their careers, or struggling for purpose-we see death winnow down Otomo's crew to just the middle-aged gangster, we see purposelessness leave Otomo himself fangless, a man in prison-who is stabbed seemingly to death (though Kitano brought him back for two sequels). Kitano's films may explore the gangster, the yakuza's grip over modern Japan, but it is a transient success, his little men, his henchmen so often thrown to one side or sent on suicide missions, or simply forced to retire. These are not the great men like Tony Montana, or the likely lads of the English gangster tradition. They don't even have the agency of the heroes of Hong Kong cinema. Kitano's films, and Outrage among them do not dwell on power, or if they do, it is fleeting, and transitory, soon to disappear or collapse.

Kitano's films are so often films that meditate rather than entertain. Yet, for all its bloodiness, Outrage is, undeniably, entertaining, and, as the bodycount, and the brutality, spiral out of control, and Kitano's Otomo struggles to adapt to the changing world he is part of, one cannot deny that it is a bloody good return to form for Kitano as the great chronicler of Yakuza cinema, in which the director/actor relishes the savagery of the genre, and meditates on the men this lifestyle leaves behind.

Rating: Highly Recommended

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