On demand: "Broken Rage"

The great masters of yore turned their hands to miniatures as the years passed, the better to practice and showcase their long-honed skills within a more manageable canvas. (Plus they couldn't guarantee they'd be around long enough to generate the soaring, sprawling, ever-reaching masterpieces of their younger days.) With the 62-minute Broken Rage, the now 78-year-old Takeshi Kitano offers a diptych of sorts: one idea, presented in two different ways. The idea will appear broadly conventional to anyone familiar with the Kitano filmography. A weary hitman known as Mr. Mouse - and played by Kitano himself, under his Beat Takeshi billing - finds himself stuck in a rut, picking up his orders in a neighbourhood cafe and then ruthlessly, bloodily carrying them out. (Call it the Deliveroo dispatch.) When he, in turn, is picked up by the police, he's presented with a whole new challenge, namely to infiltrate a drug cartel in the disguise of an undercover enforcer. So, you think: routine Kitano, business as usual for the guy who previously gave us Sonatine and Brother and several other titles in the same crime-story vein. But at the half-hour mark, just as the complications of a feature-length plot kick in, Kitano pauses the action and announces we'll henceforth be watching a spinoff, the same story retold as wacky knockabout comedy. It's the Run Lola Run or Melinda and Melinda gambit: all the same locations and plot markers, but set out in two distinct takes, in two separate keys, as an example of this seasoned creative's ability to escape the routine by finding subtle - and, as it proves here, sometimes not so subtle - variations within even the most generic material.

In place of the tersely professional Mr. Mouse of the first run, we now observe a wobbly-footed, rubber-legged goofball; for the coiled powerhouse familiar from Violent Cop, Kitano swaps in the host and presiding spirit of Takeshi's Castle. (As the director becomes more flexible, the character stumbles and tumbles.) In the first pass, the hitman's instructions speak for themselves; in Broken Rage 2.0, Kitano employs a man in a Pee-Wee Herman suit to read these orders aloud in a high-pitched voice. What was minimalist becomes overblown: a police interrogation now involves a swordswallowing act and a bed of nails, while a Mexican standoff turns into an extended game of musical chairs. Both parts demonstrate that familiar, low-lit Kitano house style: dark suits against dark fixtures and fittings, an idea of a contemporary Japan that is also acutely lived-in, as rundown as the characters themselves may appear. But the details change, and the viewer is set to spotting the difference not just between the two halves but between individual scenes. (Continuity is but one element that takes a header out of the window.) In some respects, it's a throwaway conceit, a novelty-film made not because its maker needed to, but because he's got Amazon money to play with and it's fun to keep one's hand in the game. (Especially when you still have tricks up your sleeve.) Yet increasingly it comes to seem like a teachable lesson from one of the world's great movie stars, about lines of directorial approach and the aging process alike. Somewhere beneath all Broken Rage's pratfalls and nonsense-talk lies what may, in Kitano's eyes, be the key to staying sharp and relevant as time goes by: never lose your sense of humour, and adapt, adapt, adapt.

Broken Rage is now streaming via Prime Video.