by Oscar O’Sullivan

What, to you, is more important when it comes to a story? The actual events, or the way it is told? Some stories sound much more interesting on paper than they are in practice, for example, an adaptation that doesn’t match your imagined picture of the source material. Or the opposite can be true, a story that sounds utterly stupid when described by a third party but, when you actually experience it yourself, the presentation goes a long way to elevating it. Most illustrative of this idea is the concept of the remake, the straight retelling of a familiar story. Always a source of controversy, whether they change too much or too little, there is usually something to be learned from examining what is different and why a change in content or style does or does or not work. In a culture that increasingly discourages originality and risk, remakes of all kinds have become endemic, whether it be direct remakes and reboots or the subtler (but no less derivative) “soft rebooting” of Legacy Sequels. Broken Rage could best be described as a self-contained remake, a film that saves future filmmakers the trouble by remaking itself.

Director, writer and star Takeshi Kitano has chosen familiar territory in which to execute his wild experiment, a bone-dry Yakuza story that features no narrative trickery or post-modern twists on the usual structure. Kitano plays an elderly hitman who lives a seemingly simple, straightforward life – he receives anonymous instructions at his local coffee shop, carries out efficient executions and collects his pay before the next job. His anonymous existence is interrupted when the police unexpectedly pull him in and force him to go undercover in a drug-smuggling ring, with the promise that he’ll be set free and paid off for his efforts. So that’s exactly what he does, securing a job as bodyguard to the boss and getting himself in the room with the dirty deals, setting the stage for a major sting operation. If that all sounds very dry and formulaic, that’s because it is. The plot moves from beat to beat with no frills or asides, with Kitano’s protagonist essentially being a blank slate who we learn nothing about. Of course, fans of Kitano’s prior work will already be familiar with this character, the same emotionless tough-guy persona he employs in almost all of his prior crime films. While his earlier works mould this character through external factors – whether through the circumstances of the story or by reflecting him in other characters – there is an intentional decision here to present the stock character in it’s most basic, unaffected form. This could be read as a sort of Unforgiven-style piece of reflection, the aging director/star examining his place as a relic in the modern world, but Kitano seems to actively shrug off that idea – the unassuming hitman’s age is barely a factor in the story, and the character never shows any signs of introspection or remorse, performed exclusively with Kitano’s signature deadpan, utterly unbothered by anything going on around him. Instead, the banality of the plot could be read as Kitano’s tiredness with the genre that made his film career, an admission that there’s nothing left to do except play the hits. Thankfully, this seeming disdain for the format doesn’t extend to the style of the film, shot with the same steady hand as his earlier works. Kitano is the king of allowing a scene to breathe, sitting with a moment for long enough to create the intended atmosphere, and that holds true even with the accelerated pace of this story. And while it lacks much of the shocking violence associated with his work, the moments of action do still break up the tension and create convincing impacts.

If all that sounds unimpressive, it’s because I’m giving you only half the picture. The entire truncated gangster story fits neatly into a mere half hour, with the film fading away in the final scene before displaying a second title screen – “Spin-Off”. The same helicopter shot of the city that opened the film rolls, but this time, the camera suddenly spins out of control halfway through, complete with a comical sound effect. From here, we sit through the same boilerplate gangster story as before, almost beat-for-beat, but with one enormous difference – the film is now a comedy. Before his acclaimed career as a director and film star, Takeshi Kitano made his name in Japan as a comedian. While he never fully stepped away from comedy, Kitano’s serious, critically adored film work wound up overshadowing his first career, especially outside of Japan. So perhaps this is a cheeky nod to that duality, taking what appears to be another serious crime drama in the tradition of Hana-bi or Sonatine and then immediately turning it into a farce, Kitano frequently breaking character with an expressiveness that subverts his traditional roles far more effectively than any serious plotline could.. It both parodies his past work and lends it a new impressiveness, as he reminds the audience how easily he can flip between these two modes of creation. All the humour is made doubly funny by our familiarity with every set-up – knowing the “proper” course each scene should take makes the punchlines even more enjoyable, especially as the absurdity ramps up and the digressions becomes increasingly bold (the second half comes out at least ten minutes longer than the first thanks to gags running longer than the “straight” scenes they send up). There’s an earnest simplicity to the humour, consisting largely of pratfalls and non-sequiturs, again, elevated in hilarity by how the film is still shot like a gritty gangster drama.

The line between comedy and tragedy is deceptively thin, and Kitano blurs it with gleeful abandon. Bloody murders are reframed as awkward mishaps, the taciturn sullenness of the hitman hero recast as blundering stupidity. The plot that seemed initially a little generic now reeks of anarchic absurdity without a single fundamental detail of what happens being changed. Twice the film fades to black for an intermission where the screen becomes filled with “comments” asking what the hell is going on, if the filmmakers are intentionally padding the runtime to hit feature length and what the whole point of the film even is. The point, of course, is self-evident, an exercise in self-mockery and a perfect showcase of the power of presentation. The same story told two different ways with two wildly different results, the straightforward first half building vital groundwork for the second half to tear asunder. Surprisingly fresh and modern for the work of a 78-year-old man, who will hopefully go full Eastwood and keep putting out films into his 90s. Despite being released on Amazon Prime with little fanfare, this is essential Kitano and the best film I’ve seen so far this year (though given that it’s only competition is Captain America: Brave New World, that’s not saying much). Since this will almost certainly fly under the radar for everyone except dedicated fans, I’ll at least do my part to get the word out to my (minuscule) audience. And hey, it’s only 66 minutes long, so why not toss it on instead of those three episodes of The Office you’ve already seen five times? Go on. 10/10