Black Rain

Michael Douglas plays a rude New York cop who penetrates the Japanese underworld in order to return a murder suspect to the Osaka police. Ridley Scott directed this 1989 feature, and while there’s a lot of his characteristic atmosphericssmoke, fog, neon, yellow light, rain, and squalorto fill all the dead spaces, he’s still a long way from the splendors of Blade Runner. The script by Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis doesn’t give him or Douglas very much to chew on, apart from a lot of unpleasant xenophobia about Japanese gangsters, and the plot never gets far beyond the formulaic and the forgettable, hammered into place by Hans Zimmer’s pounding and numbing score. With Andy Garcia, Kate Capshaw, and Ken Takakura; produced by Sherry Lansing and Stanley R. Jaffe (Fatal Attraction, The Accused). (JR)

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