THE RAGE (1998) **

Lorenzo Lamas stars as an FBI “Mindhunter” on the trail of a madman played by Gary Busey.  His superior (Roy Scheider) hates Lorenzo’s guts, so he saddles him with a wet-behind-the-ears agent (Kristen Cloke), hoping they’ll screw up and Roy can finally fire his ass.  After a rocky start, the two agents eventually combine their resources to stop Busey and his trigger-happy militia members from assassinating a bunch of politicians during a woodland weekend retreat.

Directed by Sidney J. (Superman IV:  The Quest for Peace) Furie, The Rage is uneven, overlong, and undercooked.  It often feels like two scripts were haphazardly stapled together.  Busey’s character starts out like a serial killer/rapist in the early scenes, but by the end of the movie, he’s leading a team of trigger-happy Ruby Ridge-inspired militia members.  They probably should’ve dropped all the stuff with him being a rapist because it lends an air of unpleasantness to the film that prevents it from being fun.  

I mean what can you say about a movie that features A) Its lead female character dealing with the repercussions of being molested by the villain and B) A random Kung Fu battle between Lorenzo Lamas and Roy Scheider?  The tone is just too all over the place to work.  Not to mention the fact that Busey’s character’s backstory is blatantly stolen from Women’s Prison Massacre.  

Furie does deliver on the action.  The car chase through a steeplechase course is a lot of fun, and I liked the sequence when Lamas’ car gets stuck underneath a speeding tractor trailer.  The climax, in which Busey is set on fire and still proceeds to do battle with Lamas, is unintentionally hilarious too.  It’s just that the jarring shifts in tone prevent it from ever getting into gear.

Lamas is more straitlaced than usual, but he still gets in a couple of funny quips.  He has a lot of chemistry with Cloke, who is asked to endure a lot of unnecessary unpleasantness.  Busey is entertaining to watch, and Scheider seems to be having fun, even though he is clearly slumming.  We also get a completely random cameo by David Carradine who provides a gratuitous exposition dump mid-movie, only to be abruptly killed off.