Outrage and Beyond Outrage, perfectly show why the "slow burn" movies are intense and awesome without a ton of action.

I Loved It

Do you like explosions? These movies are not for you. Do you like shoot outs? These movies are not for you. Do you like graphic violence? These movies are not for you. That’s what I don’t get, you look at the poster for Outrage and it mentions “all-out war” which I take that to mean – and I feel most would agree – that there’s gonna be like a moment or two of one constant shoot out, people ducking for cover, returning fire, but that never really happens, and then the quote about the movie not being for the squeamish? Have you seen like, just about any horror movie to come from Japan? This movie is not bad at all, it’s very tame on the gore and even the violence compared to a Scorcese film on the same topic (American organized crime, not Japanese). There’s no glamorized violence, no sex, it’s all what I imagine would be pretty realistic to being a part of the yakuza – except totally not.

            Now to be fair, I am not familiar with the yakuza or their way of “doing things” other than playing Sleeping Dogs on my PS3, but that’s pretty much how I think things are in the yakuza for real. Shoot outs, car chases, hand to hand combat, and bullet time.

            I’m not taking these movies as documentaries; I’m just saying that the way the characters in the movie were dealt with, characters were killed, some tortured, but it wasn’t over the top, it wasn’t made to look cool, it was – for the lack of a better word – real, and it worked. The two movies, I think, had they been filled with explosions, and shoot outs and car chases, they would have been a bit boring. I mean, I love action as much as the next guy, but even I can get bored if the action is all the time. If there is no time given to make the people involved in the action real, then there’s nothing at stake, you’re just watching shit blow up and people yell and it means nothing. That’s boring.

            I tell my kids that all the time, when we watch a movie and they say they’re bored, I tell them that for the story to mean something, to be interesting, and not boring, you have to get to know the people involved, then, when the exciting stuff happens, it’s all that much more exciting.

            They generally don’t believe me and leave to go play outside or something, but a few times they’ve stuck with it. We watched the 3 original Star Wars movie one weekend, and during the first movie they were bored and I told them about sticking with it which they did and they ended up loving them all (my son loved Empire best, which made me proud, my daughter preferred Return but mostly just because of Princess Leia’s Jabba the Hutt outfit which she thought was the coolest thing ever, and then when Leia strangles Jabba my daughter thought that was cool too). That’s the thing with these movies, it takes the time to develop the people, to let you get to know them so that when the shit goes down you’re into it, and when I say “shit does down” I don’t mean anything major, I mean simple kills that come from nowhere, are done, and then the story goes on. You’re reeling from a character dying and you know and can feel that what you just saw is gonna spark a payback and so now you know something else is coming and who it’s aimed at and that person who’s destined to get “hit” next is doing things that may save his ass or may not.

            The main thing about these movies is that you know that payback is coming and it’s gonna be a bitch, and I’m gonna enjoy watching it all the more.

I Loved It

            I watched Outrage, took everything in, the plot, the characters, and then it ended and it just felt like there was more coming. The movie wraps everything up just fine, so much so that were it to not have a sequel it wouldn’t have been a surprise, essentially Outrage follows the rise of one man and then it stops, and on its own it would have been a good movie, but with the sequel – Beyond Outrage – it turns the first movie into a giant set-up for what goes down in the next movie.

            This movie gets a good rating from me because of the story, and acting, but at the same time part of me – a big part of me – wanted some major action, I wanted to see the two gangs really come to blows over everything like a Heat style shoot out in the streets or something like that. Of course that never happened, what I got were groups of people ambushing a group of the opposing gang’s members. The thing is, much like too much action isn’t a good thing, too little can be a bit dull. Though the two movies were interesting, by the middle of the second movie I was getting frustrated that nothing really big was happening. I mean, years of tension and backstabbing and still they’re gonna just kill off a few people at a time? Realistic, I guess, and still good of course, but I wanted just a bit more action.

            It was like watching someone playing a deadly game of chess.

            If you’re into the slow burn, then these are good movies to check out, movies where a single gunshot at the end helped me decide that both of these movies were pretty awesome.