Director: Takeshi Kitano
A single yakuza story gets told twice in this 2024 double feature from veteran filmmaker Takeshi Kitano, once played dead straight and once turned inside out for laughs.
What is Broken Rage about?
The concept driving this 62-minute release is structural: Kitano stages the same underlying gangster plot as two separate halves of one film, and the tone is the entire point of comparison. The first half runs as a hard-edged yakuza drama, complete with the clipped dialogue and sudden violence long associated with the genre. The second half takes the identical events and reframes them as a self-aware comedy, poking at the very conventions the first half just used in earnest. Watching the two halves back to back turns the film into a kind of running commentary on itself, where familiar crime-movie beats are first delivered straight and then undercut. It is a compact experiment from a director known for moving fluidly between crime cinema and comedy across a long career, and here he does both inside a single runtime rather than picking one.
Cast & crew
Kitano appears on screen as well as directing, joined by a returning ensemble of collaborators including Tadanobu Asano, Nao Omori, and Shido Nakamura, along with Hakuryu, Takashi Nishina, So Kaku, and Gekidan Hitori rounding out the cast across both halves of the story.
Context & significance
Made as a Japan–United States co-production, the film continues Kitano's long-running interest in the yakuza genre he helped define internationally, while also revisiting the deadpan comic instincts from his earlier work as a television personality. Splitting one story into a serious half and a parody half is an unusual structural choice even by his standards, and it positions the film as much as a formal exercise as a straightforward genre entry.
Where & how to watch
There's no account needed to read this page, but watching the film itself calls for logging into K-Time. The platform is built around Persian-speaking audiences, and this title carries both a Farsi dub and Farsi subtitles for viewers who want the Persian-language version.