The title appears like a misnomer. At a tight 67 minutes, and with such glorious irreverence embedded within its form, Broken Rage doesn’t even need its goofs and gags to get the audience rioting. Its diptych structure, split ostensibly between commitment and parody, is “broken” in the most literal sense, but one may likely find it incredulous to suggest any kind of wistful, inarticulate pathos here, not least when billed as an action comedy. And yet, Takeshi Kitano’s latest and shortest feature to date contains at least a germ of sadness — not at surface-level, which captures the methods and travails of an aging gangster, nor in the subtext, where a sense of restlessness prevails. The sadness comes when order and subversion are juxtaposed: a unity nonetheless splintered, a whole necessarily fragmented.
Kitano, otherwise known as Beat Takeshi, reprises his lead role as a hitman, here of spartan means and stoic disposition. He’s efficient, if slow; with little more than a pair of sunglasses to signal his switch from retiree to ruthless veteran, Mouse (so he’s called by the policemen who interrogate him) has no persona apart from his killing job. Frequenting a café, where he receives regular envelopes from a “Mr. M” detailing the instructions of the next hit, Mouse executes his orders with finesse aplenty, the gunshots and wounds inflicted so casually even without Kitano’s especially lean and economic shot-cutting. But he’s discovered. Witnesses identify him, two officers of the law accost and torture him, and Mouse agrees to go undercover in a yakuza ring — first gaining the trust of the boss by staging a fight in front of him (with another undercover operative), then using the pretext of cut heroin to entrap its ringleaders in a drug deal.
The drug deal concludes, the police swarm in, and that’s Act One. But for Act Two, Kitano recycles the bare bones of the proper hitman profile and refashions them into something almost queasily off-kilter. Conceits are inverted, gags go way overboard, and Mouse plays chief buffoon in a comedy of errors: he falls flat on a chair, stumbles, sets his house on fire, etc. Props are missing too, as is basic realism. Yet to declare Marx’s “first as tragedy, then as farce” maxim without qualification misses the mark for two reasons. The first is because the film’s former half can’t quite be seen as tragic: Mouse lives, and nothing unexpected in the way of the calamitous happens. The second is because the latter half, farcical though it might be, extends into the tragic.
Billed simply as “Broken Rage,” Broken Rage’s first half comments subtly on its genre conventions, not with explicit parody, but by embodying them to a vacuum-sealed T. Each shot, locale, and intention is reducible to textbook expression and rendered expressively. Nothing conveys more than it needs to, and that this should still elicit guffaws at Kitano’s slick mannerisms attests to his infectious demeanor — what the youngsters might call “aura farming.” But it also speaks, perhaps, to the caricature his gunman embodies, a caricature from which escape is met with heightened caricature and humbling disbelief. With “Spin-Off,” the film’s second half, a Naked Gun-esque extravaganza of spoofing all but splinters its skeleton into various bits, riffed off of the comic and the scatological. Nothing quite endures except our foreknowledge of where the plot leads us; even then, it’s only as we reach its closing minutes that we come to be certain of Mouse’s happy — but only formally so — fate.
Kitano’s oeuvre has straddled modes both sacred and profane, high-minded and wantonly slapstick, and with Broken Rage, the embers of their creations appear in view. A fitting summation of his career, the film also expunges the creative force behind the gangster’s mythic appeal, dispersing all of its legendary signposts — counter-culture, revenge, poverty, fame — out of focus. Further meta-commentary admittedly proves over the top, as when unseen viewers comment on the film’s quality and production conditions during the interlude (lovingly termed “runningtime filler”), but it only intensifies the raging perception of a broken cinematic idol against the dying of the light.
DIRECTOR: Takeshi Kitano; CAST: Takeshi Kitano, Tadanobu Asano, Nao Ômori, Takashi Nishina; DISTRIBUTOR: Takeshi Kitano; STREAMING: February 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 6 min.
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