Open iTunes to preview, buy, and download this movie.
Plot Summary
In a ruthless battle for power, several yakuza clans vie for the favor of their head family in the Japanese underworld. The rival bosses seek to rise through the ranks by scheming and making allegiances sworn over saké. Long-time yakuza Otomo has seen his kind go from elaborate body tattoos and severed fingertips to becoming important players on the stock market. Theirs is a never-ending struggle to end up on top, or at least survive, in a corrupt world where there are no heroes, but constant betrayal and vengeance.
Credits
Director
Producers
Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
TOMATOMETER
77%- Reviews Counted: 39
- Fresh: 30
- Rotten: 9
- Average Rating: 6.8/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Fresh: Mr. Kitano's immaculate compositions and eccentric flourishes are part of the film's sustained, muted pleasures and are often in service to some underlying meaning.
Fresh: The results are so visually stunning, why quibble?
Fresh: So low-key and offhanded in its mastery that it becomes something like a pulp sleight-of-hand trick.
Rotten: The longer Outrage goes on, the more distance it gets from its core themes about the moral chaos of gangsterism. It becomes a film about cool killings, which may satisfy the bloodlust of some Kitano fans but hardly amounts to a return to form.
Customer Reviews
"Spoiler alert"
"ok, who wants to be the head of the yakuza?"
..."oh, me, me , me" pew pew ... Everybody die.
The end.
Waste of good money. Not gonna count on tomatoes (100% huh?!)
Tired old Yakuza cliches
Takeshi has always delighted in taking the Pi$$ as a director, and in bamboozling the gai-jin public, or at least the foreign critics, into believing that he's a legitimate artist. For some reason it's uncool not to like his incoherent, mindlessly violent films - the last one I liked was many years ago - Sonantine I think it was called. In a few of his earlier films he actually bothered to work from a script, and in this latest effort he seems to have dispensed with that little minor detail. This film is nothing more than a collection of Yakuza cliches, poorly shot hits and other action sequences barely strung together with a nearly incomprehensible (good thing you can "rewind" in iTunes) betrayals and plot twists leading the deaths of two dimensional characters, like he's setting up and shooting down cardboard cutouts at the firing range. . None of this is helped by the fact that Takeshi's deadpan delivery is wearing thin as he ages...he looks like a particularly weary old rhesus monkey, which used to work when there was at least a bit of character development occurring, at least with his secondary characters. Now it's as cliched as the Japanese gangsters he seems to relate so well to.
Helps if you know some Japanese & Japanese culture
There's a lot in this movie that's a critique of modern Japan. The yakuza portrayed here finds an echo in the way many Japanese organizations are today, albeit without violence.
Don't believe the negative reviews - despite whatever flaws this film might have, it's head and shoulders above anything from Hollywood these days.
Especially don't give credence to Roger Ebert's review - the man simply had no idea what he was watching - a Japanese movie made for a Japanese audience.
Viewers Also Bought
- Beyond Outrage
- Takeshi Kitano
- View In iTunes
- Dragon
- Peter Ho-Sun Chan
- View In iTunes
- Drug War
- Johnnie To
- View In iTunes
- Mesrine: Public Enemy #1
- Jean-François Richet
- View In iTunes
- The Suspect
- Won Shin-Yeon
- View In iTunes