If this was an American film, there would be truckloads of guns, gallons of blood, more dead bodies than I have fingers, and raging masculinity. The rapists would be Yakuza leaders who castrate their subordinates at whim and terrorize entire neighbourhoods as full time employment, laughing at impotent/incompetent/corrupt police investigators as they escalate their rampage. They would be so incomprehensibly evil that the audience would have little choice but to share a sense of vindication when the rapists' heads explode from a twelve gauge at point blank range after the avenging protagonist dispense one-liners like "I'll be back..." or "do you believe in Buddha? Well, you're gonna meet him." Also, there would be at least one glimpse of bare female breasts.
Alas, this film is not one of those formulaic Hollywood trash flicks, and it's not some standard crime-drama out to deliver elementary moral messages about juvenile delinquency or 'law and order' (and anyone who thinks it is, wasn't paying attention), and here it stands out.
Instead, the film focuses on the characters who are connected, however loosely, to the tragedy of the abduction and murder of Nagamine's daughter, from the police detectives investigating the case (and later attempting to apprehend him) to the country lodge hostess and her father where Nagamine stays during his search for the last rapist. But 'focus' is not the right word, because we never come to know any of the characters. They are like blank slates with no backgrounds. Other than the grieving father out to avenger his daughter, they have no motivations. They are strangers you will never get to know, whose fates you will never come to care about even as the end credits roll. So in spite of the score, the performances, and the desire to render a story premise more complex than simply 'revenge', in the end, the film simply becomes unmemorable.
On a side note, one thought came to me as I watched the scene where the police enters an abandoned mansion to apprehend a suspect without semi-automatics, gas masks, and a portable ram, just flash lights: Americans -do- live in a police state.
