**SPOILERS** Outragous movie about a gang of psycho Vietnam Vets who are at war with not only the US government, whom they feel betrayed them back in Nam, but the entire country as well for not giving them the moral and political support that they needed when they came back home.
Led by a Rambo-like Art Dacy, Gary Busey,these angry and unstable individuals have taken their rage and hatred back to the states by waging a guerrilla war of their own against the people and law enforcement personnel of Wasatch County.
Assigned to finding out who's responsible for over sixty murders in and around Wasatch county is both FBI man and women Nick Travis & Kelly McCord, Lerenzo Lamas & Kristen Cloke. We learn early in the movie that the man in charge of this FBI operation agent John Taggert, Roy Scheider, is actually more interested in doing in his agents on the case, Travis and later McCord, then catching the gang of psychos who turned the entire north-west into a free fire zone.
Taggert has it in especially for Travis since an unfortunate shooting incident at a place called Quantico where because of his screwing things up caused a number of FBI agents and white separatists to be killed in a Ruby Ridge-like assault by the FBI. This foul-up on Agent Taggert's, not Travis',part cost him the chance of being promoted director of the FBI and he's held Travis responsible for that ever since.
Meanwhile crazy Dacy and his and his gang of loonies are planing to wipe out the entire bunch of US government representatives who are about to have a big get together between themselves and the North Vietnamese at an exclusive compound outside of Bear Lake called the Bountiful Society. Shades of the super secret Bohemian Grove retreat outside of San Francisco?
Hard to follow because of all the side plots and double-crossing going on all throughout the film that you find yourself having trouble keeping up with what's happening on the screen. The movie "The Rage" goes from a psycho, or psychos, on the looses to a gang of veterans who were mentally damaged and left out in the cold by their government to a crazed and unstable FBI man. Who's obsessed w with hanging the man who he holds responsible for his failures. To finally a massacre of the leadership of the US government during the Vietnam war by the veterans that they sent there to do the fighting.
You have to say one thing about the movie and that is that it didn't skimp on the action scenes which were like every ten minutes. The ending mercifully made sure that the villain, Art Dacy, wasn't going to come back for an encore. I have to say that even though Dacy was as vicious and venomous as they come you could still work up some sympathy for him, not his actions, in the movie. Dacy was turned into a Frankenstein monster by the government who refused to grant him, and many other vets, the medical and psychological help they they so desperately needed and in fact even cut the meager funding that Dacy and his fellow psychotic already got.
Taggart was an entirely different type of cuckoo bird who had no reason for his despicable actions, in regard to both agents Travis & McCord. Taggarts demise at the end of the movie evoked a much more unsympathetic response even by his fellow lawmen as the SWAT team leader. As local Wasatch Sheriff Dobson(Brandon Smith), who gunned him down before he could do in both Travis & McCord,reported as he called for back up by saying: Come on down boys and pack up this trash, we ain't no litterbugs".
