Outrage

Outrage – In 1989, the British film maker, Alan Clarke directed a picture called Elephant.  The movie depicted 18 murders arising from “the troubles” in Northern Ireland.  Using documentary style, with handheld camera, Clarke shows gunmen approaching their victims, shooting them to death, and, then, casually walking or driving away – the film was based on police records, has almost no dialogue, and provides no background as to the identity of killer or victim.  To my eyes, Takeshi Kitano’s 2010 Outrage inadvertently resembles Clarke’s famous and disturbing picture.  This is not praise.  Outrage involves two Japanese crime families that operate under the supervision of an old Godfather called “The Chairman”.  For reasons that are completely unclear, the two groups of competing Yakuza, which seem to have sub-families affiliated with them, become involved in a feud.  Although there are probably underlying competitive reasons for the turf war, the ostensible cause of the feud is one group of thugs roughing up a young man affiliated with the other family in a dispute over a fraudulent bar tab.  In the first fifteen minutes, the gangsters content themselves with beating each other bloody.  Someone is told to chop off their little finger with a dull razor, a task that is difficult to accomplish.  Things escalate and people are disfigured with straight razors and dental drills, stabbed in the ear with chopsticks, and, ultimately, there are about twenty shootings as well as plenty of knifings and a beheading. The film has a relentless tit-for-tat rhythm and, according to the nightmarish logic of such things, ends only when all of the characters, including the Chairman, are dead.  The movie is well-made but entirely airless – most of the action, which is all homicidal, takes place in small rooms or corridors in what appear to be neatly groomed corporate buildings.  (Kitano is making the ancient, and specious, point that there is little difference between ordinary business competition and gangster violence.)  There is a huge cast of murderers and victims and many of them are provided detailed thumbnail characterizations but it’s very difficult to figure out who is working for whom and, ultimately, the picture becomes almost completely abstract:  a group of thugs confronts an outnumbered adversary, beats them bloody, and, then, executes them.  Kitano plays the most murderous of the gangsters but also the most realistic about the probable outcome of all this mayhem – his thug is an ex-boxer who seems to be working, at least, part time with the cops, and, alone among the criminals, he violates the Yakuza code by surrendering the police in the hope of saving his life from the out-of-control spiral of violence.  (It doesn’t work – he gets shivved in jail.)  Kitano is an impressive screen presence.  He is completely impassive to the point of resembling an Asian Buster Keaton, but periodically he explodes into horrific violence.  But I have seen him play this role before – that of the tired, aging, and deadly Yakuza, and this picture seems to me inferior to other gangster movies that Kitano has directed.  When Kitano is in the frame, the picture is compulsively watchable but, for about half of the film – including most notably and long (and racist) subplot about a African diplomat using his embassy as a Yakuza-operate casino – he is nowhere to be seen.  Perhaps, if you can follow the action, this movie might make sense.  But, even if you knew who was killing whom, there’s no suspense, no plot to speak of, and you certainly don’t care about any of the murderers or their victims.   The picture is hypnotic – you keep watching but feel a bit disgusted with yourself.  The movie seems to me almost totally pointless.