Takeshi Kitano is one of my favorite living directors, but this isn’t his finest moment. Returning to the Yakuza flick that made him a worldwide sensation, he plays over some pretty basic material here. But, as always, his sense of timing is so muted yet somehow so unexpectedly funny, his rigid formalism so amazingly cool and collected, his photography so tight and rich, and his acting so dead pan yet so profoundly watchable that it’s impossible not to enjoy it. There’s something happening here, something about the perversion of honor in modern times, something about the failure of ritual (like cutting off your finger – a time old yakuza form of apology that in this film is turned into, again and again, a discarded, ineffectual gesture). So it’s not an entirely hollow film. It may not be Fireworks or Sonatine or Zatoichi… but it is Takeshi and that’s good enough to recommend it alone. (Beware of the borderline racist portrayal of an African diplomat in a tired subplot).