What prevails throughout Beyond Outrage is a rigorous, downbeat classicism.

This is a story largely made up of scenes of men talking in offices, but without the delicious and satirical sense of a whole-cloth gangster world set apart by its own rhythms and internalized rituals of violence ...

Kitano's considerable gifts as a screenwriter and stylist-namely, his talent for staging violent outbursts and conveying narrative through elliptical cuts-are enough to sustain the film as a twisty, cynical underworld yarn.

At its best, it's a Yakuza film that stays true to the concept by injecting more gunfights, simple characters, dark humor, and a heavily bloody plotline. [Full review in Spanish]