MOVIE REVIEW : MOTIVATION GETS THE AX IN ‘CRACKED’

“Cracked” (at the Kokusai) is so very similar to Shohei Imamura’s superb “Vengeance Is Mine” that it’s hard to understand why Ken Ogata would once again wish to play a multiple killer on the run--especially since his triumphs as the star of Imamura’s “The Ballad of Narayama” and Paul Schrader’s “Mishima.”

It is equally difficult to fathom why a first-rate director like Hideo Gosha would want to make a film that would inevitably be compared with another, considering his own high achievement with his recent gangster saga “Onimasa.”

Like “Vengeance Is Mine,” “Cracked” is based on a true story, which unfolds in flashback while Ogata eludes the police after slaughtering four people. The irony is that “Vengeance Is Mine” does a far more comprehensive job of illuminating its killer’s twisted nature and its serious implications than “Cracked” does, even though Imamura’s murderer killed many more people.

Right now, the husky, forceful Ogata is at the height of his career, and he is persuasive. But the picture doesn’t explain the killer’s motivation beyond a veteran cop’s remark that in regard to the women in his life Ogata “never met a real peach.” Considering that we’re shown quite graphically Ogata taking an ax to his wife, we need more--lots more--reasons as to why we should be concerned with him. Surely, there are many men who’ve “never met a real peach,” but they don’t start hacking up their wives, killing off their children because they hate their mother’s successor and trying to dynamite women who reject them.

By the time this elegant and moody film nears its end we realize that Ogata has at last met the right woman (exquisite Mariko Fuji), proprietress of small cafe. But all the tenderness he showers upon her cannot blot out those images of him in lethal rampages. “Cracked” (Times-rated Mature for some sex and much violence) seems to be trying for an existentialist tone, but it hasn’t enough point to sustain its carnage.