This is a sad film, sadder even than Takeshi Kitano's previous films Fireworks, Sonatine, or Boiling Point. There is a pervasive sense of fatalism, a sense that Kitano is just tired. He's been through so much, including a motorcycle accident that almost killed him. In all of his characters there is a self-destructive streak, but this is the first film where every action his character takes seems devised to result in his own death. It's a little hard to take, a little too nihilistic. All of his films have a strongly nihilistic edge in them, but this one is overpowering. It is also (go figure) his most joyless film.

Kitano, acting under his nom de plume Beat Takeshi, plays his usual character, a laconic, stone-faced yakuza who has been a gangster for too long. He wears his usual blue sport coat and white shirt sans tie underneath. He is wearing a few things that you don't see in his previous films, such as a facial twitch, a bit more sag in the shoulders. In this film, he is a high-level yakuza who is banished from Japan because he is not conducive to the truce that his elders want to make with another gang. It involves taking some members of Takeshi's gang into their gang, and they know that Takeshi will never submit to being an outsider in another family. So they send him to Los Angeles where his younger brother Ken (Claude Maki) lives. He discovers that his brother is involved with drug dealers, including one, Denny (Omar Epps), whom Takeshi nearly blinds in a street fight. This is fertile ground for Takeshi's brand of chaos, and he quickly drags his brother's small band of pushers and thugs to the forefront of the LA gang scene, taking over territory from dealers and growing into a rich and frightening power. Of course, they run into the established Japanese gang, led by Shirase (Masaya Kato), but after a heart-wrenching pair of scenes they manage to join forces. Shirase is even more reckless and power-hungry than Takeshi, and the gang (who are small-time thugs at heart, not big-time gangsters) run inevitably into the Mafia, with predictable consequences.

Some of the familiar faces from his earlier films show up, such as Susumu Terajima, who played one of the comedic duo from Sonatine, and Ren Ogusi, who played his lieutenant with a taste for bad Hawaiian shirts, also in Sonatine. Their use here is somewhat depressing, although Terajima has some pretty funny scenes, especially one in which he attempts to play basketball with Epps and his friends, who won't pass to him. Like Kitano's character, they are driven by a morbid desire to die, and to prove that they are willing to die. Like Shakespeare, most of the characters are dead by the end of the film, and the deaths of these two characters are sickeningly futile. In a way, this is a more chilling and perhaps effective look into the world of the yakuza (I am assuming here, since I don't know squat about the yakuza), and it looks like a completely alien world full of people with baffling motives. Maybe that's one of the problems with the film, at least for me: I never understood, except on the most basic level, why the characters were doing what they were doing. In Kitano's other films, the actions make sense, the characters seem human. Here, they seemed preprogrammed by a mad god. I suppose that god is Kitano, which is a sad development.