Broken Rage

dir: Takeshi Kitano

2025

What in the absolute fuck was that?

Okay, okay, nothing justifies such harsh language. I had heard that legendary Japanese director and actor “Beat” Takeshi Kitano had made a new film, and that I could even watch it, if I wanted to, on one of the many streaming services I have access to, being the one that was excreted out by the metastasising, malevolent company owned by one of them there bug-eyed Silicon Valley salamanders…

It’s, I dunno, terrible maybe? Like, not even a half-arsed movie. It’s deliberately kind of a quarter-arsed movie, and I’m not even sure why. I mean, in between its short segments, there are on screen pseudo text messages that are meant to replicate the audiences’ possible mass confusion, with messages alternating between “Did they run out of money?” and “he’s a genius so I’ll trust him”.

You watch the first part, and you think “This is one kind of movie”. And that kind of movie is a low key yakuza flick where an older chap (Kitano) shuffles to a café, receives messages telling him where to go and who to kill, and then he does so. It’s perhaps implausible, but the whole point seems to be because he’s old, younger people ignore him, which literally helps him get away with murders.

Eventually, the cops catch up to him, and convince him that they’ll go easy on him in terms of charges for multiple contracted killings, if he agrees to help them out by going undercover with a bunch of yakuza goons.

If it seemed unlikely, implausible, or, you know, like bullshit before, it becomes so much more bullshit now. By beating up one guy at a bar, the yakuza bring in this chap who they’ve never met before, and promote him to the upper echelons of their group.

I mean, every time I meet a semi-competent old guy, I immediately give him the keys to my house and the passwords to all my accounts.

It all feels fairly simplistic, unlikely, generic, perfunctory. I mean, Takeshi has been in so many of these kinds of flicks, they were his bread and butter in the cinemas in the 1990s, and then there was the whole Outrage trilogy in the 2010s.

This first section is played completely “straight”. I don’t mean heteronormative, I don’t mean cis het men get to mansplain power tool usage or who should win the sportsball final this year.

I mean there’s no winking, no obvious outer sign that it is anything other than what it appears to be.

Then it kind of ends.

It’s been like twenty minutes. We then get a version redone of the first segment, except with Takeshi bumping into things, falling down, having chairs explode on him, and things generally going wrong. Kinda like those plays that go wrong (deliberately). The difference here is that I think it’s meant to be funny(?) Despite his reputation for playing hardened, murderous yakuza gangsters, cops, or hardened yakuza cops, for the last forty years or so, on television in his many roles he’s more of a jolly japester. His sillier films, which are meant to be somewhat autobiographical, are comedic more than anything else.

Mileage will vary so significantly for people who might be strangely tempted to watch this flick. If you’ve never watched a Takeshi flick in your life, this would look like the most pointless thing you ever squandered an hour of your life on. None of it would seem amusing, competent or vaguely well done. You could think it was absurd and pointless because it was made by people with no money and less clues as to what they were trying to do.

I reckon that such a circumstance is unlikely to happen, as in, I can’t imagine the random circumstances that would align resulting in someone watching this flick never having watched a Beat Takeshi flick or any Japanese stuff in their entire lives. It just wouldn’t happen.

So there possibly isn’t much need to create a two-tiered scoring system to accommodate such an anomaly of a movie. If you’ve never watched any of his films before, the score I would gift you with is zero. If you’ve seen stacks of Beat Takeshi’s movies, and lots of Japanese films in general, the score I would give you is that it is a five out of ten kind of movie.

The secret sauce is this – they basically amount to the same thing. It’s not good.

Even with my precious background knowledge and fandom, this was something tiresome to watch and too pointless to matter or be thought about that much, even if I found aspects of it amusing. Seeing them replay scenes and go in completely different directions (which usually means lots of yelling at underlings) has some of the impact of thinking “well, what if they had gone in a different direction?”, but mostly it feels like watching a blooper reel during the actual movie. But the scenes I’m talking about aren’t of the actors getting their dialogue wrong or cracking up.

In one of the re-dos of the re-do, they decide to play musical chairs. And they did a few rounds of it. I wondered if they were going to do it all until all the chairs were gone, and one person was left standing, but whether they edited the rest out (which I doubt, because this flick feels like everything they filmed, and edited down, they put in the first sequence, and everything else edited out they bunged on the end). It could be one of the most pointless things I’ve ever seen. Plus Takeshi loses at one point, pushes the guy out of the chair and takes his place, and they all pretend like he didn’t cheat, because he’s The Boss. Not in the movie, of course, since he’s The Mouse in the script, but in everything else, The Boss, and don’t you forget it, even if he can barely make it up a set of stairs unaided.

This feels like a bunch of people got together, got bored with what they were doing, and then decided to just wander off into the night. Maybe they’re such respectful people that they didn’t even bother to ask for their pay? Maybe they were so honoured to be working with the great Beat Takeshi that they thought any time spent in his presence was worth it for the privilege alone?

Alternatively, and I feel like this is a bit of a reach, but maybe Takeshi wanted to make something self-reflective or comedic, that was kind of reminiscent of his flick from the early 2000s called Takeshis, as in, the film where he plays multiple Takeshis. One’s the actual Beat Takeshi, and the other Takeshi is the one who wanted to be a comedian and actor, but didn’t quite make it, went a different way, walked his own unsuccessful path.

This has some elements of that earlier flick, it’s just that it was done in a competent manner that time. You could kinda see what he was trying to do, but also how far from the mark it desperately falls.

This flick, Broken Rage, whose title makes no sense in any context, thus it must be parody, probably shouldn’t exist. Like an unwanted pregnancy, this should have been aborted early and often. For Takeshi stans and completists only.

5 times even at 66 minutes this was way too long out of 10

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“It’s better than dying in jail, you filthy bastard.” – keep the change ya filthy animal - Broken Rage