7.4 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
As the police launch a full-scale crackdown on organized crime, it ignites a national yakuza struggle between the Sanno of the East and Hanabishi of the West. What started as an internal strife in Outrage has now become a nationwide war in Outrage Beyond.
Starring: Takeshi Kitano, Ryô Kase, Toshiyuki Nishida, Shun Sugata, Machiko OnoForeign | 100% |
Drama | 36% |
Crime | 20% |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Japanese: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English, English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
BD-Live
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Watching Beyond Outrage, the sequel to "Beat" Takeshi Kitano's 2010 return to the Japanese gangster genre in which he first rose to prominence, I was struck by an unexpected similarity: Kitano, who writes, directs, edits and stars, had plotted the film the same way Shakespeare plotted his major tragedies. Both artists share the same fascination with the intricacies of conspiracy, deception and double-dealing. Long, ominous buildups erupt in sudden bursts of violence, sometimes of Grand Guignol extremes (think of Gloucester's eyes being gouged out on stage in King Lear). The story ends unhappily with a pile of corpses. Admittedly, Kitano's yakuza speak in prose, not verse, and much of the prose in Beyond Outrage is profanely direct (assuming the English subtitles are accurate). But Kitano's poetry comes from his memorable visuals, where gangsters confer like corporate directors but with the weight of an ancient brotherhood's tradition to guide them (and sometimes mislead them). Beyond Outrage plays out in a secret world separate from and largely invisible to that of the average person. In that sense, it's like the world of Shakespeare's nobility: a class apart. The tragedy was only beginning in Outrage, and its full dimensions aren't yet visible by the end of Beyond Outrage, because the third part of the trilogy has yet to appear. However, Kitano has structured the individual stories so that this second part reaches a logical interim conclusion that provides both a resting place and a point of departure for his grand finale.
Like the preceding chapter of the trilogy, Beyond Outrage was shot on film by cinematographer Katsumi Yanagishima and finished in post-production on a digital intermediate. Magnolia Home Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced from digital files. The image is clean, sharp and detailed, with a kind of silky density that comes from having deep and solid blacks. The color palette is almost otherworldly, consistent with Kitano's creation of the yakuzas' separate world. Daytime outdoor shots are almost uniformly tinted blue (some might even say "teal"), as if to convey that environs outside the criminal clans are a cold and lonely place. Indoor locations for the yakuza tend to have rich and deeply saturated colors; these are the seats of power. Government facilities, such as the police station and the prison, are dull and washed out; there is no real power there. Magnolia has shown an unfortunate tendency toward BD-25s lately, and it has squeezed this 112-minute film onto a single-layer disc with a relatively low average bitrate of 17.50 Mbps. The trend is unfortunate, but I did not see issues with compression in Beyond Outrage. It probably helps that, despite the menace of the film's performances, much of the story involves conversation that builds to short, quick explosions of violence. The long scenes of consulting and conspiracy allow a skilled compressionist to conserve bits for more demanding sequences.
The original 5.1 Japanese soundtrack for Beyond Outrage is presented in lossless DTS-HD MA, and for much of the film, it's a subtle mix. Many of the film's settings are distinguished by their stillness, so that the main sound to be heard is the exchange of dialogue among the various cops and gangsters plotting their machinations. Unlike most American films, however, Kitano and his sound mixers aren't afraid of letting voices move to left and right across the front soundstage, which helps convey the sense of space in larger meetings. In locations with distinctive sonic signatures, the soundtrack opens up for dramatic effect. Perhaps the most notable example is a sequence in a pachinko parlor where the characteristic sounds of the machines surround the listener as the camera tracks through the room, until it reaches the spot where important events will occur; then the sound drops out, so that only those key events are heard, and when they are over, the cacophony of pachinko balls cascading through fields of tiny pins resumes. Other environments with distinctive sounds include Kimura's baseball facility and an auto junkyard which is the scene of a forceful interrogation. Outrage composer Keiichi Suzuki returned for Beyond Outrage, and his score has a noirish, jazzy sense of foreboding.
Long-time Kitano fans may be disappointed at the relative restraint of Beyond Outrage compared to some of the extreme violence for which Kitano's earlier films were known, but the director makes it clear in the Outrage "Further" Beyond documentary that he has grown more interested in the psychology of violence rather than the act itself. An interesting theme that emerges from the actors' interviews is their enjoyment of the freedom of yelling and swearing in ways they cannot indulge in real life. One of the actors notes that Kitano's yakuza films explore questions of manhood (women being almost wholly absent from the scene), because the characters live outside of "regular" society and have adopted their own definitions of what it means to be a man. In Beyond Outrage, many of those traditional definitions are collapsing. It remains to be seen what (if anything) takes their place in the final chapter of the trilogy. Highly recommended.
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