Rage

Three seemingly unrelated stories are connected by the hunt for a killer in Rage. At a bloody crime scene, police find a murdered couple and the word “rage” written on the wall in blood. This begins a manhunt for the prime suspect Yamagami, who is known to change his appearance. This manhunt affects the lives of Yohei (Ken Watanabe) in Chiba, Yuma (Satoshi Tsumabuki) in Tokyo, and Izumi (Suzu Hirose) in Okinawa, who all come into contact with individuals, who may or may not be this fugitive killer.

Director Sang-il Lee follows up his 2013 remake of Unforgiven with this crime drama that tells three stories in three different Japanese cities. Each story has an individual, who is suspected to be the killer the police are after, whether it be Yuma’s daughter Aiko’s (Aoi Miyazaki) boyfriend Tashiro (Kenichi Matsuyama), Yuma’s new lover Naoto (Go Ayano), or mysterious drifter Tanaka (Mirai Moriyama). As the story develops, each protagonist experiences rage in their own way.

With a 142 minute running time and multiple plotlines, Rage is a quite slow moving film, which didn’t always keep my interest. While there are the occasional flashes of violence, including a quite graphic rape scene, most of Rage is more a drama than a thriller. Even though I’m a big fan of Ken Watanabe, who previously starred in Sang-il Lee’s Unforgiven, his presence was not enough to bring me fully into this long, slow, and sometimes confusing film.