(4/5)

Here’s my thing with Yakuza films, or really any mafia-style gangster films: I can never, ever manage to keep track of who everybody is, what side they’re on, or why they do what they do to the people they do it to (I mean why specifically in each case; the why generally is fairly obvious). I know that’s partially the point, as loyalties shift and everyone usually has multiple agendas and power plays going on, but I still usually find myself just having to go with it and enjoy it for each moment, at least for the first time viewing. My usual state of mind is something like “okay, I’m not sure who these guys are, but they’re going to rough up that guy, not sure why, but there must be a reason, and OH YEAH VIOLENCE.” Takeshi Kitano’s latest Yakuza film Outrage is pretty much the same, but with even more outrageous kill scenes and bodily injury than I’ve seen before, so I quite enjoyed seeing what new and shocking ways he’d come up each time, even if I was unclear on the details of the shifting familial alliances.

I won’t even bother trying to synopsize the story, even if I could, because really, that’s not the draw here. It’s a bunch of aging Yakuza bosses getting into petty squabbles that escalate over and over until basically, everybody’s dead. Not a spoiler, because what else would you expect to happen? But even though the film is largely men in suits talking or yelling at each other punctuated by bursts of flamboyant and stylishly shot ultraviolence, I found myself quite engaged and entertained throughout. And by the end, the basics of the families’ relationships to each other was starting to become clearer and with a second viewing, I think I would be able to keep everything straight (especially knowing who’s left standing at the end).

The title captures the basic pitch of the film, which is that this violence is borne out of uncontrollable rage, which rises quickly with not much provocation and results in bloody, bloody mayhem. As far as I could tell, the initial conflict was set off by a guy from one family racking up a gambling debt in a casino which, unbeknownst to him, was owned by a rival family – the rival family demanded more money, but then discovered the first was from a more powerful family, and by that time enough insults had been thrown around that of course a full-on war was in motion. There’s more to it than that, given the way the ending suggests behind-the-scenes machinations all along, but yeah. Petty argument yields outrage yields violence, some of it self-inflicted, as some men try to make amends by offering their fingers -a traditional sign of contrition that is interestingly marked by the film as outdated and essentially ineffective.

Not that Kitano is making any kind of moral point about all this. He’s taking as much glee in all of this as his audience does, and he ratchets it up every chance he gets, almost to a cartoonish level at times, which has the effect of making the film quite funny, too. I won’t tell about the best scenes of ultraviolence, because them coming out of nowhere at the drop of a perceived slight is all part of the fun. It would be nice if the between-violence parts were a little more compelling on their own, but like I said, I think they would be on a rewatch, once you know who to pay attention to for the underlying intrigue. I also don’t have a lot of Yakuza film experience (or Kitano film experience for that matter; this is the first of his films that I’ve seen), so I don’t have a lot to compare it to. But I did enjoy the hell out of watching this one, despite having the most inconvenient seats in the entire theatre.

Writer/Director: Takeshi Kitano
Cinematography: Katsumi Yanagijima
Producers: Takeshi Kitano, Masayuki Mori, Takio Yoshida
Starring: Beat Takeshi, Ryo Kase, Jun Kunimura, Tomokazu Miura, Tokio Emoto
Country: Japan
Running Time: 109 min