Takeshi Kitano's Outrage: BANG! BANG! BANG!

Gangster movies are violent. Goodfellas has its infamous "Layla" sequence, The Godfather has the celebrated baptism montage, Casino has the brutal vice scene. These scenes stick with us because they are built to in a way that the audience understands the stakes, and cares about the characters involved. Takeshi Kitano's Outrage, a Japanese yakuza tale, has more than enough artfully presented violence, but sparse to nonexistent character development, a convoluted plot, and a script that's heavy on tough-guy one liners and light on exposition leave the film fatally flawed.

The drama starts at a kind of yakuza summit at the home of The Chairman, the boss of a powerful yakuza family. The Chairman expresses unhappiness over one of his lieutenant's association with an unaligned mobster, a revelation which sets off a chain of betrayals, and double-crosses, and an orgy of violence. As events spiral into chaos, we see different yakuza playing off one another, but we never learn why. Characters turn on each other seemingly without warning or reason. As the body count mounts, it becomes harder and harder to care about who is doing the dying and who is doing the killing. Many of the yakuza who occupy significant amounts of screen time go nameless, and none are fleshed out as personalities beyond "a tough, violent gangster."

By the third act, the violence has spiraled so far out of control, and so many of the major players are dead, that the audience is treated to a long montage of ancillary characters offing each other, culminating in, obviously, a finale centered around gun-play. Celluloid violence can be effective and engaging when it serves a purpose, unfortunately, much of the gore in Outrage feels prurient, almost pornographic rather than part of the tapestry of the film.

On the positive side, Kitano is an able director, and he leaves us with some very well-shot scenes. There are also moments of wickedly clever black humor scattered throughout the film, a tone which is much better suited to the cartoonish violence.

Of course, you may disagree. Outrage has one more SIFF showing at the Everett Performing Arts Center on May 27th at 9:30. Don't get shot!