The first thing you probably need to do after watching Broken Rage is rush to the internet and explore the legacy of director Takeshi Kitano. Since I wasn’t all that well-versed with Kitano’s work, I dug a little and found out the man used to be a huge deal as a comedian in Japan, and then he went on to make a slew of hardboiled crime movies, all centering on the Yakuza. That does explain Broken Rage, by the way, if you think about it—it is both a Yakuza movie and a deadpan comedy. Of course, what separates this from anything else is the director refusing to follow the typical movie formula of telling the story, act by act. Instead, he has told the same story twice here—both as a comedy and a drama. In fact, the second part is like a spoof of the first.