Review: In Beat Takeshi’s Kubi, Samurai are Queer Yakuza

Internationally famed director Kitano Takeshi is back. This violent, darkly funny film has some surprises in store for viewers.

By Noah Oskow

In Japan, there’s hardly a more well-known face than that of Kitano “Beat” Takeshi, man of a thousand comedy shows, political roundtable programs, theatrical films, and more. And, historically, there’s nary a more prominent figure from the samurai era than Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the farmer-turned-warlord who unified civil wartorn Japan in the 1590s. Bring together Takeshi’s directorial flare and love of violence, wry comedy, and the story of Toyotomi’s blood-soaked rise to power, and you get Kubi, a 2-hour+ samurai epic that doesn’t seem to care whether you take it seriously or not.

Kubi is Takeshi’s first movie in six years, following on from 2017’s Outrage: Coda. Its genesis, however, came thirty years earlier, while Kitano was working on his acclaimed Okinawa-set crime film Sonatine. It was near the beginning of the Kitano Takeshi cinematic boom, where the director’s idiosyncratically violent and funny cops-and-mafioso films were turning heads overseas. That Kubi took so long to develop makes sense — it’s a markedly large-scale undertaking for the director, with a budget of…