Review: Kitano's Outrage

I finally review another movie! It's been exactly 8 months since I last wrote one. I should be writing more, because according to analytics, my reviews are getting the most hits on my blog. Anyway, read on, this is a review on the new yakuza film from the awesome Kitano. Enjoy.
Outrageously RepetitiveNew flick from Kitano, hell yeah! There's a lot to love in Outrage. First, Kitano is back at making yakuza films. How long has it been, you ask? 10 years! Last time Kitano made a yakuza film was back in 2000 when he released Aniki (brother). Why is this important? Well, what Kitano is to the Japanese cinema is like Martin Scorsese to the American cinema. He's most badass at making yakuza (Japanese equivalent of gangster) films. The only difference is, Kitano stars in all his films, because he's so fucking badass himself.Second thing to love in Outrage: the cast. Starring along side Kitano we see actors like Shiina Kippei, Miura Tomokazu, Kohinata Fumiyo, Kunimura Jun, Sugimoto Tetta, and Ishibashi Renji. All veteran badasses, except for Kohinata, he's mostly been in comedic roles, and he's in Outrage for a little bit of comic relief.Third thing to love is the violence. Man, there are scenes in this film that made me cringe and look away from the screen. If you are going to learn anything out of this film, it would be the variety of methods the yakuza can use to fucking kill you.With that said, you could tell I was fucking psyched to watch Outrage. So how was the end product? Well, not so good I'm afraid. My first complain: not enough Kitano!!! I'm not talking about style, the film is very much Kitano-ish. I'm talking about Kitano's role. It just wasn't big enough. I like Kitano as a director but I love him as the actor. He has his own unique acting style and is always a joy to watch, whether he's playing a maniac teacher (Battle Royale) or a quiet blind swordsman (Zatoichi) or a filmmaker parody of himself (Glory to the Filmmaker). I expected him to be the big boss and kicking everybody's ass in Outrage, but he only did a little bit of ass kicking and was killed off in the most un-epic way possible. His character was so one dimensional and had zero development. The same can be said about every character in this film though. I guess it was hard to develop the characters with such a huge cast.With characters having no depths, naturally there's not much for the actors to work with. So the performance was very average. I expected highly of this group. It was a shame for this cast not to shine in a film like this. There was  a bright spot though. Shiina Kippei's role wasn't big, but he made the most out of it. He was intimidating, scary, and funny at times. His character had different layers and I wish he was in it moreThe biggest downfall of Outrage though, was the paper thin story. It went like this: talk about killing, kill, talk about killing some more, kill again, repeat till all major characters die off, end. After the first hour, the film became so repetitive it was frustrating. It didn't even build up to an epic end fight. Everybody just died, no one put up a fight. And the ending? So predictable even my mom saw it coming and she wasn't paying much attention throughout the film.Overall, Outrage was a huge disappointment. Even though there was some action, but it wasn't enough to make the film badass. The cast's mediocre performance and the lack of character developments also hurt this film a lot. Well, I guess great filmmakers have their off days once in a while.Outrage trailer:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apa1r1iFuvs