review by Kurt Halfyard
Black Rain 1989
Reviewed Jun 04, 2012
Kurt Halfyard’s review:
The end of Scott's reign of stylistic excesses in the 1980s, Black Rain was far more fizzle than sizzle upon its initial release, and only looks worse twenty-odd years later. The film aims for a contemporary Blade Runner setting in the the harshly lit mean-streets, markets and nightclubs of Tokyo and it is safe to say that visually, the film is interesting (as are all of Scott's films) but as a police procedural which tries grasp and diffuse the US/Japanese tensions of the decade, the script is an abject disaster. Not only postulates that Japanese would be a lot more effective at ... something ... if they just adopted the American cowboy approach. It makes not a lick of sense from a police procedural standpoint, or for that matter a gang-war one. There is suspending disbelief then there is watching Black Rain.
Further writing on Black Rain coming up Monday on Rowthree's Ridley Scott Retrospective: www.rowthree.com/
Yes! I watched this today for the first time and when it was over I thought... there was literally nothing I liked about this.
Hop on over to Rowthree.com tomorrow afternoon, the other 3 paragraphs of this review will be live. Yea, I didn't like this at all, the first time, or when I watched it last Saturday afternoon. Its offensive in its casual racism...
Weird to think that they offered Jackie Chan the villain role back in 1988.
Black Rain successfully displays all of the worst parts of that era of film-making. It does servr as a good time capsule, though.
I think you have to look at the racism in the film (not condoning it) as a bit of a product of it's time; a Song of the South, for the eighties might be over stating it a bit. A lot of film had that us v.s them attitude towards the Japanese. Michael Keaton's Gung-Ho directly deals with that issue. I realize I maybe writing this to Canadians...but you get it..for the first time the United States was being bested industrially by another nation and it happened to be the Japanese who bombed us; Americans had to collectively learn to deal with that, only they didn't because the Japanese economy went into a real slump.
I was too lazy to put the blu-ray in to get the exact time, but, there is the most egregious example of a crew member being caught on the frame and they used the footage hoping no one would notice. It comes near the end when Douglas or someone rather is riding the motorcycle through the vineyard when the Yakuza is meeting; it comes about the time whoever lays the bike down and a fight in the mud breaks out. You can clearly see a crew member coming out from behind a tree in a green windbreaker clearly visible for a couple of seconds.
The film had potential but Douglas's not stop douchery sank what could have been an interesting film. I think Douglas wanted to be like Mickey Roarke and where sunglasses and ride motorcycles in his movies, except they forgot to not suck.