Mr. Sleeman Is Coming

     Ridley Scott's Cop Drama

     In Black Rain (1989) we never see Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas), a New York policeman, driving a car.  In the first scene he challenges a motorcyclist to a race.  After winning, he's home playing a message from his ex-wife about not getting the kids this upcoming weekend.  He rides his motorcycle to work, runs into his partner, Charlie Vincent (Andy Garcia), gives him a ride.  

     Later, during lunch in a restaurant/bar, three Japanese tough guys enter and challenge some older men seated at a round table.  The tallest and most menacing man, Sato (Yûsaku Matsuda), slices the throat of one of the seated Japanese men while covered, gun-wise, by the other two toughs.

     It's Yakuza business, Japanese mafia.  Sato takes a box from the man he's just murdered.  They leave, pursued by Nick Conklin.  He later collars Sato.  Charlie and Nick are given the thankless task of flying to Osaka to deliver their prisoner to Japanese police.  Once in Japan, still on the plane, a group of Japanese cops arrive to take custody of Sato, showing papers in Japanese to Nick and Charlie.  Nick signs them.  Two minutes later the actual cops show up.  

     Nick and Charlie fell for a trick that seems old.  I've never seen it done in a movie before, but they should've been more suspicious, as in the saying, Make sure you know what the papers say before you sign them.  This development allows Sato to escape, for he is Charlie's and Nick's antagonist throughout.  They're given permission from NYPD and from Osaka law enforcement authorities to participate in the hunt for Sato.  

     Sato is a young and arrogant prick trying to join the upper ranks of the Yakuza, but he has little or no respect for his elders' authority.  He does have a certain item stolen from the man he murdered in front of Nick's and Charlie's eyes in that restaurant/bar: a metal plate for counterfeiting one-hundred dollar bills.  The plate shows just one side of the bill's image.  The Yakuza elders are in possession of the other plate.  Why the two are kept in separate boxes confused me, but I also didn't really care.  

     The presence of an American expatriate, Joyce (Kate Capshaw, looking more like Julie Christie than any other American actress), in an upscale Osaka night spot made no sense to me, but her scenes have the benefit of showing off her beauty.  

     Steven Spielberg, a billionaire, gets to make his crappy films and he's married to that gorgeous woman.  

     Anyway, Joyce has information on the Yakuza scene.  Of course she does--she's an American nightclub hostess with the inside scoop on all the personalities in organized crime, like in an old movie, with a character who sits off to the side playing solitaire, a bottomless gin and tonic on the table, uttering remarks to the hero about various people; in the know, cool, someone who will survive whatever mayhem might occur in the film.

     Nick Conklin doesn't adjust well to Japan.  He's an American, he's forceful, abrupt, a griper.  He can't relax.  Joyce never gives him a blowjob.  She does kiss him at the end for some reason.  There's nothing between these two other than information exchange, but we're led to think that maybe Joyce and Nick will unite in relationship harmony, even though her life is in Osaka and Nick's is on the streets of New York where he can weave through traffic on his motorcycle.

     If you're getting the impression I didn't like this movie, you're right.  Directed by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Gladiator, Alien), Black Rain is a slick but hollow 1980s cop melodrama.  Japanese location shooting has its interesting moments--the climactic scene shot in the country shows a stimulating contrast to the neon-saturated imagery of the big city--but most of all I was gripped uncomfortably by the portrait of an irritable New York cop acting like a typical American cliched character, someone unable to adjust to the idea that other cultures do things differently.  Though there are such people, watching one of them struggle to not be the asshole he essentially is grew tiresome.  If Sato had shot Nick five or six times in the chest and then cut off one of his ears for a souvenir I wouldn't have felt bad about it.

     I also thought, "Oh, they're making fake hundred dollar bills?  Is that worse than attacking Panama and killing thousands of civilians?"

     I know, not an apt comparison.  

     In an example of reaching, one Yakuza lord says to Nick Conklin that in 1945 he and his family took refuge from an A-bomb explosion.  Whether in Hiroshima or Nagasaki he doesn't say, but he relates that after they stepped out from the shelter a "black rain" fell on the destroyed city.

     What this dramatically intoned anecdote has to do with the film I have no idea.  Nick is unmoved, apparently.  He just wants to know how to find Sato, how to wrap up his case so he can fly home, listen to his answering machine, take a bachelor's swig from a water bottle he keeps in the fridge, fantasize about Joyce, and bury his partner, Charlie Vincent, slain with a sword by the smiling creep, Sato.

     It's a stupid movie.  Had it starred Chuck Norris I could forgive its faults and just be entertained.  I expect more from Ridley Scott.

                                                                                Vic Neptune