The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Boiling Point (1990), directed by Takeshi Kitano

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Ichiro Goes to the Moon", by The Baseball Project

       Quite an interesting fellow, this Takeshi Kitano. I first knew him as the creator of the bizarre Japanese game show ‘Takeshi’s Castle’, which was redubbed as ‘MXC: Most Extreme Elimination Challenge’ on Spike TV in the early 2000s. Later on I became aware of him as the brains behind Takeshi No Chousenjou, or Takeshi’s Challenge, an infamously shitty game for the Nintendo Famicom which was made with the intent of confusing and frustrating its players, like forcing players to wait five actual minutes for a code to appear or sing a several minute long perfectly (the Famicom controller featured a built in microphone). That this guy was a filmmaker, a relatively successful one at that was this nebulous thing in the back of my mind, like I knew it was true but I had no idea what to make of that information. So I avoided it for years, until the winds of fate shifted me in his direction and I said ‘fuck it’. I feel like he’d want it that way.

‘Beat’ Takeshi’s second feature-length film, released only a year after his debut Violent Cop, Boiling Point centers mostly around Masaki, a young man with a personality not unlike a boiled cabbage. Masaki lives a simple life, drifting between his job at a gas station and pinch-hitting for a shitty neighborhood baseball team known as the Eagles, until his lackadaisical attitude ends up getting him in trouble with the Otomo Group, a local branch of the Yakuza. Masaki’s friend and coach Iguchi, himself a former gangster, attempts to resolve the conflict only to receive a beating for his trouble, and subsequently disappears, supposedly traveling to Okinawa in order to buy a gun so he can kill the bastards. Masaki then decides that he too will travel to Okinawa and buy some killing machines, and the whole sordid tale unfolds from there. I don’t know where the boiling part comes in though.

Taken on its own, something like Takeshi’s Challenge might have seemed like a conceited vanity project, but after watching Boiling Point you realize that this is just the way Beat Takeshi rolls. The whole movie is like trying to have a drunken conversation with your girlfriend’s disapproving parents; The long pauses, the sudden shifts to other subjects, the awkward conversations, and of course the explosive bursts of violence. It’s all natural though, there’s never a sense that he’s riding someone’s coattails or trying to follow. Where other directors have their visions sullied by outside interference, Beat Takeshi has made the exact movie he wanted to make, i.e. full of Yakuza and designed to weird people out. You might not respect it, but you have to recognize it.

       Combining bleak, nihilistic or absurdist humor with the ‘crime’ genre is a pretty popular combo, especially in the late 80’s-early 90’s when Kitano stood side by side with filmmakers like the Coens and Quentin Tarantino, but I think Boiling Point might be a case where things got a little too absurdist for its own good. Progressing the plot feels like it takes at least half the film, and even when we do progress we are subjected to endless amount of faffing about in the process. Which can have a certain appeal when you’ve got the cast to support it, which is not the case with Boiling Point. Aside from the character Takeshi plays himself there’s nobody in this movie that’s all that compelling, especially Masaki, who as I mentioned loses out to a block of wood in a charisma contest. Which means that those 90+ minutes very crawl along at a snail’s pace, as we are subjected to Kitano’s pretentious attempts at being edgy and lolrandom. 

       This is his second movie though, at least in terms of directing, so I guess we can give him a little leeway in that regard. For fans of gallows humor by way of gangster movies Boiling Point might be the thing to cure what ails you, to others it’s just a sign that the water for their instant ramen is ready. Either way it’s not a must-watch movie, and I don’t feel an urge to recommend it. The choice, however, is always yours.