‘Broken Rage’ REVIEW: Takeshi Kitano's tragicomic take on his legacy
‘Broken Rage’ REVIEW: Takeshi Kitano's tragicomic take on his legacy
Beat Takeshi as Mouse / Amazon Prime Video
Takeshi Kitano’s follow-up to his Sengoku-period farcical samurai comedy, Kubi, takes us back to modern times and to a familiar side of him. Premiering out of competition at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, Broken Rage follows a simple premise. An aging and unremarkable hitman named Mouse, played by Beat Takeshi himself, is caught between a rock and a hard place when he is arrested by the police and coerced into infiltrating a yakuza group. It all sounds straightforward and routine for a crime thriller, but its execution is anything but. As an experiment in style to find “comedy within a violent film”, Beat returns to his roots in comedy and yakuza genre to tell a single story in two different ways: one as a brooding crime thriller, the other as an absurdist self-parody.
The first part of Broken Rage barely registers on its own, caged within the film’s 66-minute runtime. Merely a dilution of a Kitano yakuza joint, it falls short of what made his films certified classics, missing the special sauce that defines his best work: the way he eases you into the worlds he builds, letting you linger and exist within them. His previous films, in one way or another, often turn into a kind of hangout movie, a slice of life that immerses you in the exciting, the mundane, the hilarious, and even the violent.
But here, he can’t afford to do that. The short runtime gives the characters no time to breathe. No space to just live. Moments go by like a breeze, leaving us as far away as we can be to this world. And because we aren’t really given enough reason to care, the catharsis from its payoff is unfelt. Even veteran actors Tadanobu Asano (Vital, Ruined Heart, Shōgun) and Nao Ōmori (Ichi the Killer, Helter Skelter, First Love) aren’t given much to work with, making their performances feel restrained and muted.
Tadanobu Asano and Nao Ōmori in Broken Rage / Amazon Prime Video
But that’s all intentional in Takeshi's aim to contrast grit with comedy — an equilibrium that he masterfully achieves in the film’s second part. It’s a complete tonal shift at this point, and Takeshi goes full throttle with the insanity, turning the film into something far more surreal and unhinged. He throws in everything from deadpan absurdity to improv chaos to slapstick lunacy, all in service of creating a hysterical romp that revels in its randomness and stupidity.
It’s the kind of comedy that is both meticulously thought off and completely off-the-cuff, designed to catch us off guard and elicit laughter through sheer unpredictability. The kind where a tense confrontation somehow spirals into an endless chain of Mexican standoffs, only to culminate in a game of musical chairs called “The 432nd Musical Chairs Grand Prix,” hosted by a man in a white top hat and suit.
I was in stitches throughout the second part, so I’d call the experiment a success. However, I remain unconvinced by Kitano’s reason for making the film. Finding “comedy within a violent film” is something he has successfully done multiple times before, albeit with much more subtlety — whether it’s a dirty cop slapping a suspect for information so many times that it veers into cartoonishly slapstick in Violent Cop, or a heated exchange being derailed by a hitman’s automatic rifle, hidden in a bouquet, going off for no reason as both the hitman and his target stare in deadpan confusion in Boiling Point.
Broken Rage, on the other hand, takes a far more blatant approach, as if Kitano is less concerned with reinventing his style and more interested in seeing how far he can push the ridiculousness. And if that is the case, then what exactly is he trying to say with this film?
Mouse in a police lineup / Amazon Prime Video
Broken Rage calls to mind another film from Kitano, the self-indulgent, autobiographical Takeshis', where he turns the lens on himself, weaving a feverish self-parody into a surreal reflection on his career in the entertainment industry, his and others’ perceptions of him and his art, and the other lives he could have lived. Like Takeshis', Broken Rage unravels Kitano’s career and public persona, but where the former drifts into an indecipherable, free-flowing fever dream, the latter presents its introspection in a more direct and accessible way. It even ventures into the mind of the aging Kitano, exposing his lingering doubts about the legacy he will leave behind.
If you grew up watching the Tagalized version of the cult game show Takeshi’s Castle on GMA in the mid-2000s, you’ve probably seen Beat Takeshi before as the evil count whose castle serves as the stage for painful and difficult physical challenges that contestants must overcome. But I bet you remember the skits and segments featuring the hijinks of its Filipino hosts and special guests more than him. To most of us, Beat is probably just a fleeting image in that show, merely a man clad in lordly robes, driving a cardboard box tank that shoots lasers in the final battle, overshadowed by the silliness of the game and Joey de Leon’s voiceover commentary in the “funny” voice he uses in SexBomb Girls songs. I’d assume the same is true for the rest of the non-cinephile world.
Takeshi Kitano to Japan, however, is an entirely different realm. He’s a household name and a bona fide cultural icon of the entertainment industry. A comedian, tap dancer, actor, filmmaker, and painter, he is a true renaissance man who shifts between disciplines with an almost effortless fluidity. You can name names in Japanese showbiz, but good luck finding anyone who can match his stature and impact. Maybe Yukio Mishima, the author and poet-turned-ultranationalist disgrace, but then again, he wasn’t as effortlessly charismatic without his muscles, wasn’t as endlessly funny as Kitano, and only made me laugh when I read the details of his failed coup and botched seppuku on Wikipedia.
Kitano’s versatility as an entertainer extends to the films he makes, ranging from brutal yakuza thrillers like Outrage to meditative tales of human connection and purpose like A Scene at the Sea, and even heartwarming, family-friendly dramas like Kikujiro. He even dabbled into surrealism with his metatextual trilogy, which includes the previously mentioned Takeshis’, followed by Glory to the Filmmaker! and Achilles and the Tortoise.
Beat Takeshi as a mouse / Amazon Prime Video
Yet, for all his range, Broken Rage feels like Kitano’s way of confronting the fear of being pigeonholed as a one-trick pony and his life’s work being reduced into mere fragments of a much larger tapestry. Though Takeshi’s Castle still stands proud and strong, its king frets over the history books. Will they remember the grandeur of his kingdom or reduce it to a single, oversimplified jest? A career spanning 50 years, filled with reinvention and experimentation, risks being remembered through only two lenses: the comedic and the nihilistically violent. So, perhaps that’s why he structured the film into two contrasting halves — each representing the polar extremes of his filmography — as a way to craft something wholly unique and push back against the simplification of his artistic identity.
In this preoccupation with legacy, the film finds kinship with Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron. Both films are made by titans of Japanese cinema and grapple with how an artist’s body of work will be remembered, but with differing levels of optimism and acceptance. While Miyazaki embraces the inevitable decay of the tower he has built, encouraging the younger generation to construct towers of their own, Kitano takes a more defiant stance, determined to remind everyone that he has more than just two towers.
But true to Broken Rage’s contradictory nature, Kitano can’t help but be realistic. A third part — one that few seem to acknowledge, content instead with basking in the nostalgia of the Kitano-esque brand of humor and violence — reveals just how trapped he feels in the confines of others’ expectations, as if it’s already too late to change people’s minds. This final rumination on legacy lends the film a tinge of sadness. For all its defiance, the film carries the weight of an artist grappling with the realization that, despite a lifetime of reinvention, perception is, more often than not, unshakable.
‘Broken Rage’ is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
