In April last year I wrote an entry about the release of ‘Rain Fall‘ (2009); a film I wanted to see in Japanese but couldn’t due to the language barrier. The boot was well and truly on the other foot for once given that it’s usually Japanese who suffer because of the time it seemingly takes to put subtitles on films or American TV shows here.

Anyway, thanks to my friend Ethan (who sent me a link) I was able to watch it recently and how disappointed I was. I have only just finished reading the sixth Barry Eisler book to follow the life of anti-hero John Rain (a half-Japanese, half-American former soldier turned freelance assassin) and really enjoyed that as well as the previous two which I read back-to-back over the last couple of months. All gripping stuff but, as is often the case, the film version was not up to scratch in my opinion.

It starts off OK and is very Bourne-esque in the filming and story-line but it went downhill completely in the second half of the movie with plot holes and unconvincing fight scenes which just didn’t live up to what was described by Barry Eisler in the book.

Gary Oldman is in the film and put in a good performance and while the Japanese actors gave it their best, I found it to be a bit wooden especially when they had to speak English which is not too often as the movie is predominantly in Japanese.

By the time ‘Rain Fall‘ reached it’s cliché ending I was quite despondent that an exciting novel about a hit man with issues had been transformed into a fairly dull and boring movie.

Tokyo Fox Rating 5/10