I may come to regret this review, but for now, if I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that I barely followed this story from start to finish. Either I’m an idiot or this is just classic noir man. A genre so convoluted and notoriously complicated you need to read 30 other reviews just to ease the burden of interpretation. I half-jest. 

This one isn't as dull as many of the ones I've seen, but it spends way too much time telling me things, introducing new wrinkles, new scandals and headlines, with characters galore that don't really reveal their motives until you stop caring. The basic premise is there —the story of an avenging secretary who hunts down (Liam-Neeson-style) soulless bureaucrats to repay his father's death—but the screenplay is incredibly poker-faced in the most bloated, unfocused and frustrating of ways. 

Intellectually, the nightmare logic at the center is really interesting. How far must Mifune go in order to expose corporate corruption? Is there a line at which, once passed, makes him no different than the evil he's trying to snuff out? Does evil beget evil? Unveiling the shades of tangled grey in a morally twilight world has always been the strength of noir. That and the visual identity of noir (high-key, low-contrast lighting) has always had a way of expressionistically getting you into the headspace of a morally twilight character. But dammit, so many of these stories are belabored by exposition and larded with shapeless levels of detail that it becomes difficult to feel emotionally invested. 

Mifune's 5-year revenge scheme, while elaborate, is probably too elaborate for its own good. The extreme length of the film (even at 2 ½ hours) gets embezzled by its own conspiracies, many of which are not very interesting and only compound the story's bungling sense of confusion. Parsing all the espionage, deaths, bribes, fake ghosts, cover-ups, and identity games, along with how this off-screen character may have been corrupted or killed by that off-screen character, is just exhausting. Maybe these details don't matter at all. Maybe I'm getting hung up on the wrong things, and I probably am. That said, the film is visually strong and the ending is bleak as hell, which I loved, even though by the time it came I was far checked out. There's a good idea at its core of becoming evil to fight evil, but it spirals into too many subplots and varying levels of cryptlike scandal it never held my interest.

PS: I’m probably an idiot.

Kurosawa Ranked