Takeshi Kitano -- if you are looking behind the camera, or Beat Takeshi if you are looking in front of it -- returns to the crime scene after the lighter interlude of Kikujiro. (Easy tip to remember which name belongs where: it's the scar-faced actor who looks beat, as in tired, weary, spent, if not as in beaten, battered, whipped, crushed.) The scene soon switches, however, from Tokyo to Los Angeles -- something new, after all -- as our zombified yakuza escapes one gang war only to enter another one. Or more accurately, instigate another one: it seems something of a gag that the undemonstrative Japanese proves to be quicker to violence, and fiercer when he reaches it, than the famously trigger-happy homies. The body count is staggering, the cops never come into it, and the entire affair is too abstract, abstruse, and affected to be in any way affecting. But one thing you always get from Kitano is pictorial composition, a punctilious concern for framing, scale, lines and planes. This formal precision sits a little oddly amid the rainbow coalition of local thugs, though not unwelcomely. No less oddly or unwelcomely than the stringent ban on rap and hip-hop on the soundtrack. Omar Epps, Claude Maki, Masaya Kato. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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