Rainy Dog

Plot

The film begins with the main character, Yuuji, being fired from his yakuza syndicate. Soon he finds work for another boss solely as a pay-per-hit assassin, killing members of other syndicates. His life starts to become more complicated when an ex-girlfriend or hooker drops his son off at his house. His son, who is mute, begins to follow him, where the boy watches him shoot a man who is having lunch with his wife and infant son. Afterward, the boy follows Yuuji to a whorehouse where he waits outside. While waiting, he eats food from the garbage and befriends a puppy who is chained in the alley.

The prostitute and Yuuji develop a live-in relationship (possibly by contract with her procurer). Things get much more complicated when the brother of Yuuji's recent victim, a lawyer, approaches his brother's yakuza syndicate to request heading the revenge attack on Yuuji. The mark's brother discovers the relationship between the hooker and Yuuji and augments her website to offer a reward for anyone with information about her. Yuuji, girlfriend, and son are on the way out of town when Yuuji calls his new boss to get a passport.

Yuuji's new boss, who knows about the reward and calls the mark's brother, despite the fact that he hired Yuuji. Yuuji can tell by the sound of his bosses voice that he has been betrayed so he leaves their current location and seek refuge at a transgender homosexual male's apartment who is a friend of the prostitute. While browsing her website on her friend's computer, the prostitute discovers the reward offering on her website, informs Yuuji and the two begin to wonder where the prostitutes friend went to. They spot the friend outside, waiting nervously downstairs and realize he has turned them in for money.

Yuuji sends his girlfriend and son together to a train station and gets revenge on his boss. Meanwhile, his son and girlfriend are captured by the lawyer (the mark's brother) and Yuuji's girlfriend is killed. Yuuji faces off with the lawyer, but gets knocked out due to a distraction by Yuuji's son, after pumping a few bullets into Yuuji, which makes him appear dead. As Yuuji and his son rejoice, an old acquaintance, a low quality and comical hitman, appears and kills Yuuji. After the hitman leaves, the lawyer reawakens and gives Yuuji's son a speech, telling him if Yuuji's son wanted to seek revenge in the future, that he will be waiting.

Release

The film was released on 28 June 1997.

Reception

Sight & Sound described the film as a "relatively subdued effort" from Miike, whose plot was "Stretched somewhat thin over 95 minutes". The review noted "moments of melancholy lyricism, but Miike is rigorously unsentimental in his approach to the father/son relationship - which barely figures until the closing scenes."