The police department orders the cop Kataoka to come up with a plan to neuter the syndicate. It's here that we start to notice the film's narrative gears creaking a bit. We learn that Kataoka was playing a "long con" back in the first film and was never truly corrupt (though he did get too chummy with the people he was fooling) and that Kitano's character, the haggard footsoldier Otomo, wasn't killed behind bars at the end, but survived his shanking. "You started a rumor that I was dead," Otomo tells Kataoka. This is a bit too much like comic book or bad-TV storytelling: declaring, "Pay no mind to what you thought you knew" because it's the only way to tell the story you want to tell. 

Here, that story is "Takeshi Kitano kills a bunch of people." Granted, that's the story Kitano has told many times before, often superbly, particularly in such classics as "Sonatine" and "Fireworks" and "Brother," which are the closest thing to classic Clint Eastwood vehicles as Japanese popular cinema has produced. Like Eastwood's gangster and cop films, Kitano's crime thrillers know how to have their cake and eat it, too. They critique the mentality of macho, prideful, violent men operating in a world largely devoid of women, while at the same time giving the films' overwhelmingly male audiences the tribal carnage they want. The attitude is, "Crime doesn't pay and revenge is futile, and in case you didn't get that, here's some more crime and revenge."

There are marvelous satirical touches in Kitano's yakuza thrillers. They crystallize the idea that, as in the "Godfather" films and Martin Scorsese's gangster pictures, you're seeing colorful metaphors for business in general, and for an old way of life being supplanted by a new one. The first half-hour of "Beyond Outrage" is an elegant and bleak comedy that finds murderous gangsters griping about workplace politics, and features some of Kitano's strongest filmmaking.

As always, Kitano displays a fine eye and ear for the details of protocol. When Otomo hooks up with an old adversary from a rival crime family in "Outrage"—Hideo Nakano's Kimura, whose face Otomo slashed with a razor—the man gifts Otomo with two godsons who are supposed to protect him, but are so incompetent that Otomo can barely protect them. Otomo can't turn the young fools away because it would be an insult, just as it would be insulting to turn away a prostitute given to him by an Osaka crime boss. (The prostitute shows him her bare back before leaving, so that he can describe her gang tattoos and make it seem as though they slept together.) There are many jokes at the expense of the the new Sanno-Kai crime boss' tone-deafness and cheapness.  "No meal served at an executive meeting, damn," an old foot soldier mutters. You get the feeling that if Kato had better people skills, his underlings might not be in such a hurry to expose his past treachery. Sometimes the difference between conspiracy and contentment is a nice lunch.

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