The films of Takeshi Kitano mimic American genre films in some respects but do so in a unique way, and his later films have developed more levels of meaning and layers of plot and character development that extend the nature of the genre in new directions. Kitano generally favors the crime drama, usually in stories about the Japanese crime groups known as the Yakuza and the police. Kitano himself plays the hero, who is usually a troubled policeman or gangster with a complex and dual involvement in family matters and violent crime at the same time. Kitano thus deals in contrasts, and his directorial style emphasizes and balances the competing interests of the main character as well as the ambiguities of modern society. This is evident in early films like Boiling Point (1990) and Violent Cop (1989), but Kitano makes such contrasts even more central in later works such as Sonatine (1993) and Fireworks (1997).
The heroes of these films derive from the American hardboiled tradition and the American film noir style of the 1940s. They are generally taciturn and deadpan, suddenly exploding in violence when provoked. The film noir was a social, psychological, and aesthetic response to a certain sense of societal angst that developed first in the uncertainties of World War II, a period of world tensions manifested in the psychological ambiguities of film noir, and then continued in the new uncertainties of the Cold War period, especially in the years immediately after World War II when American society was straining to recover from the war while also trying to adapt to the new line-up of international friends and enemies. Kitano's use of some of the conventions suggests that he is responding to a sense of societal angst affecting Japan in a period of national decline and uncertainty, which fits with a country whose economic system has shifted from high growth to a recession while other parts of the world are continuing to grow. In any ...