Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on June 2010

When Japan’s leading comedian Beat Takeshi decided to become a film director in the late ’80s (under his real name, Takeshi Kitano), he specialized in gritty, deadpan, hyper-violent yakuza flicks. Those early films—Violent Cop, Boiling Point and Sonatine—won rave reviews at home and abroad. Kitano’s oeuvre then bounced around from melodrama to slapstick comedy and, more recently, art house pic, to notably less success (an exception being his cop-drama masterpiece, Hana-bi). Now he’s returned to his roots and produced an even more gruesome and vicious film. Kitano plays Otomo, the second-in-command of a faction of the Sannokai, a major yakuza gumi in Tokyo. When his boss Ikemoto (Jun Kunimura) makes a pact with a minor gang in the area, the capo of the Sannokai is displeased, and Otomo must work to rein in the smaller group. What follows is a spiral of unrelentingly intense violence. Though the camerawork is superb and the editing fine-tuned, Outrage will appeal only to those who are enthralled with gangland mayhem. (109 min)