Outrage is the film that many fans of director Kitano Takeshi (and, no doubt, his investors) have been clamoring for ever since he embarked on his art-house odyssey with 2002's Dolls. The ensuing years' films ranged from introspective (Takeshis) to wacky (Kantoku Banzai!), and brought him critical acclaim but not much success at the box office. Outrage is clearly designed to please fans of Takeshi's earlier films, such as Sonatine or Violent Cop: hard-boiled gangster films taking places in the shadowy world of Japan's yakuza.
The plot revolves around an internal power struggle within an established yakuza family: a fairly standard trope in gangster films in the East and West. Building on this frame Takeshi piles on a number of events, the sequence characterized by the sort of surreally disconnected quality that I associate with his films. It's difficult to follow causality from one event to the next, and in many cases they seem to operate as interesting vignettes loosely connected through the overarching plot. Some are blackly humorous, some are brutally violent, most are characterized by lots of yelling and cursing in the sort of coarse Japanese that's really difficult for non-native speakers to get. Luckily the plot is simple enough to follow, but I do wonder about missing out on some of the finer details...
The characters are filled out only in broad strokes, and most of the standard types are represented: the godfather-like boss, the loyal lieutenant, the conniving underling, the dundering muscle and so on. Takeshi gets generally excellent performances out of the cast, who manage to come off as sincere and spontaneous. He mentioned in a recent television interview that he shoots most of his scenes in only one or two takes, and the film feels fresh. There's some very good talent here, mostly genre actors but good ones. You develop sympathy for a lot of them by the film's end, which is a mark in its favor.
One of the things I really enjoyed about the film was Takeshi's camera-work, which remains sharp and eye-pleasing as ever. He makes effective use of wide-angle close-ups, and does some great riffs off of Coppola in several scenes. Long pans and still shots are also used well. One that really sticks out in my memory from the beginning of the film is a low, outside shot of a line of black cars, just the rear quarter panels, lined up one after the other traveling down the road. It's an odd shot, but serenely beautiful and effective at conveying a sense of the power and menace of the men inside.
On the minus side, the plot really is simplistic and predictable. Not to the extent of boredom, but once you understand the setup it's not at all hard to imagine how things are bound to turn out. Also, I thought the film felt, on the whole, a bit too clean. The cars in every scene are immaculately polished, every actor is decked out in a neatly arranged designer suit, and every set has all of its props in a neatly prescribed arrangement. It presents a somewhat dystopic, but ultimately whitewashed view of yakuza society that would feel retrograde in a Western gangster film.
Overall, it's nice to see a new yakuza film come out of Takeshi's shop, hallmarked with the same sort of black humor, extreme violence and artistic flair that we've come to expect from this perennial festival honoree. I would, however, have liked to see a bit more of how his intervening films might have affected this genre. Outrage is a good yakuza film, but doesn't do much (enough?) to step outside of its element.
