"Let's Wage War": Beyond Outrage

When I was fresh out of High School and in my first year of college I used to go to this video rental in Old Town Eureka called Video Experience.  I was tuned into the place by the brother of my girlfriend (at the time) who was also introduced me to the insane world Takashi Miike.  I was hooked on this place.  I used to rent 7 movies a week from them and just eat up foreign films and gangster movies etc.  Then came that fateful day when they announced they had to close that location.  I was crushed, but we went to their going out of business stock sale and I found this little VHS tape of Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine pointing a gun at me on the shelf.  It was 2 dollars, I figured "What the hell."  Ever since I've been obsessed with Kitano's films, so imagine my delight one particularly sleepless night when I found Beyond Outrage as I scrolled through the netflix titles.

Picking up five years after the events of it's predecessor Outrage, the film chronicles the booming Sanno and Hanabishi crime families.  Opening with the discovery of a dead cop and a bar hostess in a sunken car, the police force determines that the Sanno have gotten too big for their britches.  They employ the skills of Special Inspector Kataoka, who has gotten close to the families under the guise of a corrupt cop.  Through suggestion and direct maniuplation, Kataoka uses Kitano's character Otomo and another disgraced yakuza, Kimura, to completely destroy the leadership of the Sanno family.

Kitano has had a tough time with critics following the release of his "Meta Trilogy" (Takeshis', Glory to the Filmmaker!, Achilles and the Tortoise) so when he returned to the yakuza film genre with Outrage it came as somewhat of a surprise as well as a delight to audience and critics alike.  While Outrage and Beyond Outrage don't quite have the meditative quality about them that a film like Sonatine or Hana-bi do, they still manage to pull in the audience and hold interest up to the final moments.  One of Kitano's best qualities when it comes to this genre is his ability to set up and expectation and then surprise the audience in it's delivery.  As a dramatic actor, he has a kind of new wave deadpan style, only showing emotion in the extremes which makes his violent explosiveness sudden and thrilling to watch.

The disappointing thing about this film is the incredibly straightforwardness of the plot.  It's very much an A + B = C sort of experience, which is not what I usually expect out of Kitano.  However, this is subjugated fairly well by the actors and cinematography.  Fumiyo Kohinata eyes everyone with the look of a Japanese Fox mask as Kataoka.  It's no surprise to the audience that he's manipulating the outcome at every step planting suggestions that the yakuza hotly act upon bringing their own doom upon them.  Even though we know that Otomo and Kimura are going to get these guys, Kitano manages to still do it at the moment when least expect it making the violence sudden and brutal.  I'll never be able to look at a baseball batting cage the same way again.

Not one of his best, but certainly not his worst either, Beyond Outrage is a solid yakuza film and the first direct sequel that Kitano has ever made to one of his films.  There are currently talks of a third film, which would make it his first direct trilogy of his career.  If you haven't seen Outrage watch it first.