Outrage

The head of a large yakuza organisation called Sancho-kai says that one of the subordinate groups has grown too close to another family. That sentence is enough: the subgroups turn on each other, each level sacrifices the one below to do the work of the one above, and the chain runs downward. Otomo, a mid-level boss, is caught in the middle of it. Nobody rises over the course of the film; everybody is spent. Takeshi Kitano directed and plays Otomo. It was his first yakuza film since 2001, after a stretch of experimental work that did not do well commercially, and he came back to this deliberately. Kitano did not hide his intention. In an interview with the Yomiuri Shimbun he said his only ambition on this one was to be entertaining. The promotional slogan in Japan summed up the moral frame: everyone is bad. What separates it from his early yakuza films is the tone. The cold, distant composure of those characters is gone; everyone shouts, everyone is frightened, and the violence is often crude. It was selected for the competition at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival. Who it is for: viewers who like the yakuza genre and Kitano's sudden, unprepared violence. Who it is not for: anyone looking for someone to hold onto. There is nobody to sympathise with, and that is not a flaw but the design.