Beat Happenings No. 9: Outrage Coda
The end of the line
Hi, I’m Bryan and this is my newsletter, Beat Happenings. Each installment focuses on Japanese comedian, TV host, actor, and filmmaker Takeshi Kitano, a.k.a. Beat Takeshi, and one of his yakuza films. This week, his ninth and final gangster movie, Outrage Coda.
Beat Takeshi and Omori Nao in Outrage Coda (2017)
A lot happened to Takeshi Kitano in the nearly three decades between the release of Violent Cop in 1989 and Outrage Coda in 2017. He had gone from being a popular comedian and TV host to a world-renowned filmmaker, directed 18 movies and acted in dozens more, almost died in a scooter accident, became a parody of himself with a series of masturbatory art films and rediscovered his creative form in his mid-60s. So what better way celebrate turning 70 than with another idiosyncratic gangster film?
Although Kitano’s Otomo had sworn off being a yakuza repeatedly in Beyond Outrage, he’s returned to a life of crime by the time Coda begins. But he’s traded Japan for Korea and is now working for the stoic and extremely professional Mr. Chang. Because of this, he’s living a slow and peaceful life on the island of Jeju until one of his men is killed by Hanada (played by Pierre Taki), a visiting yakuza who is part of the Hanabishi clan from the trilogy’s second installment. When Hanada and the rest of the crime syndicate realize who they’ve crossed, they scramble to make amends, but it’s not enough for Otomo, who heads back to Japan to defend the honor of his boss and his fallen henchman. If you’ve read any of the first eight issues of this newsletter, you can probably guess what happens next.
From what I’ve read about the Outrage trilogy, Kitano seems to have been taken aback by its success (not surprising since he originally killed off Otomo at the end of the first). And maybe it’s because of this that he decided to have some fun with Coda. In the movie, he blends the brutal street-level violence of Outrage with the boardroom intrigue its sequel, ramps it all up to a cartoonish level, then sprinkles in some sadistic jokes. The first two Outrage films may lack the faux profundity of Kitano’s 1997 film, Hana-bi, but they can both feel just as self-serious. This isn’t the case with Coda. Instead, Kitano has Otomo walking around with pants pulled up high like a grandpa, wearing hideous bug-eyed sunglasses, screaming that his name is “Fuck Off,” and stuffing a lit piece of dynamite in a Hanabishi member’s mouth. After dealing with the yakuza’s nonsense for three films, it would appear that both Otomo and Kitano were ready to let loose.
Coda is nowhere near as controlled as the first two parts of the Outrage trilogy and is better because of it, displaying some of the reckless abandon that made earlier films like Boiling Point and Sonatine so memorable. This is most clear in its big set-piece, during which Otomo and his right-hand man, the endearingly rumpled Ichikawa (Omori Nao), burst into a banquet hall filled with members of the Hanabishi and start mowing them down with machine guns they’ve concealed inside of umbrellas. As the two of them gleefully make their way through the room in slow motion, the power-hungry Nishino (Toshiyuki Nishida), the true mustache-twirling villain of the trilogy, pleads with Otomo to stop, yelling “Mad motherfucker! You’re out of your fucking mind.” It’s a scene that’s at once over-the-top, disturbingly low key and truly absurd—in other words, it's vintage Kitano.
Despite its title, Outrage Coda doesn’t really feel like a final chapter. While it may mark the end of Otomo’s story, it’s clear that the yakuza, in each and every one of its contemptible ways, will go on. The movie isn’t some grand statement or wish fulfillment (although, there’s a little bit of that), instead, it feels like Kitano’s goodbye to the genre. Of course, it’s delivered with his trademark smirk, making clear once and for all how he feels about his subjects.
That’s it for the ninth installment of Beat Happenings. And that’s also it for this newsletter—at least this iteration of it. I’ve reached the end of Kitano’s long line of deeply weird yakuza films and am going to take a couple of weeks off before returning with something new. In the meantime, why not watch one of the Kitano movies I’ve written about over the last two months? You can’t go wrong with any of them (even Brother).