Story: Yuuji, a yakuza banished from his homeland finds paradise in the rundown parts of Taiwan. To make ends meet, he does hits for the local Taiwanese Triad. One day, a woman from his past pops into his house and dumps him with a kid that she claims is his. As if that wasn’t enough to occupy his mind, his latest hit (a gay mob boss) has stirred up the boss’ brother. Uniting with the local Triads, they long to hunt down this foreign hitman. To make things worse than they already are, another hitman from Japan has finally tracked Yuuji down for the kill. With all the chaos a step behind him, he stills find time for love.

Review: When I first discovered Miike, I fell in love. His bizarre vision and disregard for viewer friendly sequences only locked him forever into my mind. From there, I went on a steady progression of his films: Fudoh, Dead or Alive, City of Lost Souls, Dead or Alive 2, Audition, Happiness of the Katakuris, etc etc. His older films were things I would read online and imagine. They were so inaccessible before, but now that Artsmagic has brought us his lesser known films, it enables us to take a deeper look into the mind of Miike.

The thing about Miike is, you either love him or hate him. There really isn’t an in-between. Although he’s been hyped up as this eccentric and unpredictable director who conducts every scene with perversity, if you take a closer look, most of his movies deal with character interaction and dialogue. Between the scenes of Kakihara mutilating people and Riki and Sho busy tearing up the world, we see him trying to show us the emotions and complexity of each character. ‘Rainy Dog’ is no exception.

The centerpiece of this whole film is Yuuji and his pretty meaningless life. Watching him stroll through the slumps of Taiwan, you wonder why he even bothers to go on. His family back in Japan had disowned him, he was being used by the Taiwanese triad; nothing was really going his way. Enter the son.

Even though he shows no love for his illegitimate child, it’s easy to see how having even the knowledge that there was someone out there that could depend on him, injects a little joy into Yuuji’s life. The two of them rarely exchange words but they understand each other to the fullest degree. Yuuji’s relationship later with the prostitute also has the same effect. What Miike has done here is that he threw together these three people who have no concept of what the ideal family should be like, and assigned them the role of a corresponding member of a family. They can live perfectly fine without each other, but no matter how dysfunctional and troublesome it is, the bottom line is its family, and they long for that bond. It’s a twisted symbiotic relationship.

So where’s the Miike ultra violence?! Where’s his perversity?

‘Rainy Dog’ is one of the most straight-forward Miike films to date. That could be to the viewer’s benefit or loss. There are some exchanges of bullets, but it’s in an awfully tame way. Rather than glorifying anyone’s death, Miike makes it quick and rough. Instead of showing every bloody detail, this time around, Miike focuses on the reactions of the people it affects.

In the end, ‘Rainy Dog’ is somewhat of an ode to the family unit. The most heroic character in the whole movie isn’t Yuuji himself, but the ‘enemies’ hunting him down. He seeks to kill simply for money, while the very people trying to kill him seek vengeance due to a lost love, tainted honor, or family ties