While we still await a U.S. release for Takeshi Kitano’s samurai epic Kubi, his latest film is getting a worldwide release next month. Broken Rage, which premiered at Venice Film Festival last fall, was picked up by Prime Video for a global release, which will now take place on February 13. Ahead of the debut, the new trailer has now arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “Broken Rage follows a hitman, Nezumi (played by Takeshi Kitano), fighting for his survival when he’s caught between the police and yakuza. But in the second half, the gritty crime-action thriller takes an unexpected turn, evolving into a self-parodying comedy that retells the same story with a captivatingly humorous touch.”
Leonardo Goi said in his Venice review, “Enter Broken Rage. Split into two chapters, the film kicks off as a crime thriller before switching tones altogether and revisiting the first part scene-by-scene in a more delirious light. Kitano stars in both as a gun-for-hire. Infallible in the first and hopelessly clumsy in the second, he’s “Mouse” a hit man whose murderous routine is upended once cops recruit him to infiltrate a drug ring. Tonally distinct as they may be, humor permeates both parts. Even in the ostensibly more “serious” first, Kitano’s script moves with a childlike logic: it only takes Mouse a couple of punches in a staged brawl with another mole to ingratiate himself with the mobsters he’s been asked to spy on. His killing-machine loner is a comic riff on the other unbeatable assassins he played in the past (think of Otomo, the thug of his Outrage saga). But the commitment to poking fun at his onscreen personas is something I hadn’t seen him do since 2005’s Takeshis’, a comedy that nonetheless spiraled into self-indulgent flights of fancy. Nothing farther from Broken Rage’s spirit. This isn’t just a wildly funny film––the kind that sent people around me at the press premiere into convulsed laughter just a few scenes in––but a pointed rebuke to the discourse that saw the director’s two impulses (popular comedy and artful seriousness) as opposite poles in a magnetic field.”
See the new trailer below.
