Outrage

Takeshi Kitano is a leading Japanese film and TV industry character and charismatic screen personality (as "Beat" Takeshi). The multi-talented Kitano's early film directions created a distinctive "deadpan" style of glossy, black-comic and violent portraits of yakusa gangsters and corrupt police (Violent Cop, Boiling Point, Sonatine), starring himself as a man of few words and harsh action. In 2010, after a decade of unpopular experimentation with other forms, he returned to his crime metier with Outrage, a stereotypical gangland movie with a few cinematographic flourishes.

They mostly comprise fixed or panning distance shots of lines of sleek limousines, on otherwise empty highways or parked outside gangster mansions. The opening scene is the most memorable: a long tracking shot of black-suited yakusa drivers and henchmen awaiting the emergence of their family bosses from a yakusa council meeting. Kitano's expressionless face is one among many, all silently conveying the extent and menacing power of the gangs, whose carefully structured world is as far from reality as that of fedual royalty or corporate tycoons.

Throughout the film, only one detective is seen questioning the yakusas, and he's immediately established as a paid-off associate, and an old schoolpal of Kitano's character. He has a name, as do all the gangsters, and the four families they belong to, but for a non-Japanese it is difficult to develop a clear understanding of who's who and which of them is a blood brother or son of whom. All be-suited and seriously treacherous, they can only be distinguished by the actors' facial quirks, and it isn't worth trying to know their names: they don't matter.

Kitano, who wrote, edited and directed the movie (in his usual omnipotent fashion), gave himself a central character with a surprising level of gullibility, and loyalties almost as divided as those of his yakusa rivals and henchmen. One by one, the yakusa chief arranges the slaughter of competing families, only to be slayed at the end by his own badly-treated lieutenant. In between, gangsters are stabbed with a dental drill and chopsticks, shot in a train and many limousines, machine-gunned, beheaded by a speeding rope and have many finger ends sliced off. The only outsider involved, apart from slain call girls and waiters, is an African country's ambassador tricked into turning his embassy into a casino. He survives, digging a grave for a family boss.

As that scene illustrates, this is a minimally credible movie Kitano may have made out of financial necessity. It isn't a worthy use of his old multi-talents. He's still a charismatic presence, but the light has faded.