General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Boiling Point (3-4X10月) (1990 film)

Boiling Point (Japanese title: ３－４Ｘ１０月, 3-4 x jûgatsu) is a 1990 Japanese crime comedy written and directed by Takeshi Kitano, his second feature film and the first he directed from his own screenplay¹. It follows Masaki, a mild-mannered gas station attendant and member of a losing amateur baseball team, who travels to Okinawa to buy a gun after falling foul of the local yakuza, and there falls in with Uehara, a violent gangster played by Kitano himself². The film should not be confused with the 1993 American action film of the same name starring Wesley Snipes and Dennis Hopper³.

Key fact	Detail
Original title	３－４Ｘ１０月 (3-4 x jûgatsu), referring to a baseball box score and the month of October¹
Director and writer	Takeshi Kitano, his second feature and first from his own script¹
Japanese release	September 15, 1990; 96 minutes; distributed by Shochiku⁴
Principal cast	Yûrei Yanagi (Masaki), Yuriko Ishida (Sayaka), Beat Takeshi (Uehara), Guadalcanal Taka, Dankan¹
Critical reception	94% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 16 reviews; 64% Popcornmeter⁵
Awards	Winner, International Feature Film Competition, Torino International Festival of Young Cinema 1991; Japanese Academy nomination for Best Editing¹

Spoilers

Plot

Masaki (Yûrei Yanagi) works at a gas station and sits on the bench of the Eagles, a losing junior baseball team⁴. When he punches a rude customer who turns out to be a violent gangster, the yakuza come down on the gas station demanding compensation, and the conflict escalates until the team's coach is severely injured⁶^•⁷. Masaki and his friend Kazuo travel to Okinawa to buy a gun for revenge².

In Okinawa they meet Uehara ('Beat' Takeshi), a local yakuza who is in serious debt to his own organization and planning a revenge of his own⁷^•⁸. Uehara takes the two young men on what the Australian Centre for the Moving Image describes as an increasingly absurd road trip in which moral, sexual, and criminal codes become mixed up⁶.

Style and themes

Kitano's second film continues the idiosyncratic approach of his debut Violent Cop (1989): operatic bursts of violence contrasted with elegant, largely wordless scenes of contemplation⁶. Critics noted the film's handling of tone, which the Chicago Reader's Lisa Alspector described as ranging "from the grimly depressive to the irreverently hilarious"⁵. The film blends elements of the sports movie and the yakuza genre while subverting the conventions of both, and it introduces imagery, including flowers, beaches, and the underworld culture of Okinawa, that recurs in Kitano's later, better-known films¹.

Kitano appears late in the runtime in a supporting role as the deranged Uehara, a performance the BFI calls that of a "psychotic yakuza" and which one scholar's account describes as a sadomasochistic, possibly suicidal cipher refining the onscreen Beat Takeshi persona²^•¹. Reviewers have noted that the film can feel like two separate stories: the first half follows an ordinary person whose life is disrupted by the yakuza, while the second follows Kitano's outcast gangster on a downward spiral⁸.

The title

The Japanese title translates literally as "3-4 x October". According to Tom Vick, Curator of Film at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution, it refers to a baseball concept: a one-run game is particularly exciting in October, during playoff season¹.

Reception and legacy

The film won the International Feature Film Competition at the 1991 Torino International Festival of Young Cinema and was nominated for the Japanese Academy Award for Best Editing¹. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 94% Tomatometer from 16 reviews, with critics such as Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune (3.5/4) praising Kitano as "scary, hilarious and, in a strange way, touching"⁵.

Kitano himself later judged the film a failure. In a 2009 interview with the film critic Sadao Yamane, he said he had intended a different tension from Violent Cop but that the film "completely failed," and that this pushed him toward making a clearer film, which became A Scene at the Sea (1991)⁹. The film was released in the United Kingdom on January 18, 1991, and re-released there on July 29, 1994¹⁰. The BFI issued the film on Blu-ray in 2020 and rates it 15 for strong violence and language².

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026