Black Rain

• Cat.no: PLFEB 35821
• Cert: 18
• Running time: 120 minutes
• Sides: 2 (CLV)
• Year: 1989
• Pressing: UK, 1997
• Chapters: 28 (14/14)
• Sound: Dolby Surround
• Widescreen: 2.35:1 (Super 35)
• Price: £19.99
• Extras : None
  

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  Director:

  Ridley Scott

  (Alien, Thelma and Louise)

Cast:

Michael Douglas (The American President, Disclosure, The Game)
Andy Garcia (Godfather III, Things to Do in Denver…)
Kate Capshaw (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)
Ken Takamura
Yasuka Matsuda

Onpaper, Ridley Scott’s Black Rain reads like a winner: a policeaction thriller with Michael Douglas and sidekick Andy Garcia(then a little known star in the ascendant) as an NYPD cop hunting a villainin Japan.

Where the film scores heavily is on the visual style level; this isBladeRunner imagery without the superficial Sci-Fi megabudget specialeffects overlay. Or plot. The film looks startling throughout, due inpart to Scott’s collaboration with Dutch cinematographer Jan De Bont(later director of Twister, not to mention Speed and its sequel); everyframe is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, Scott is not shooting a Hoviscommercial here and we need a rather more substantial screenplay – suchas Alien or the extraordinary Thelma and Louise – than theflimsy sketch on which Scott hangs his current images. Generally, though,Michael Douglas – and the rest of the cast including the versatile KateCapshaw (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)- are wasted.

Things start off well enough with a leather-jacketed Michael Douglasracing his cycle against a fellow biker along a New York quayside. Aha,could this be a set up to be paid off later in the script? And sureenough, the Japanese villain, on home turf, rides around on two wheels,and the film finishes with a climactic cross country bike chase.(Ironically, this one is nowhere near as good as the one in Diva,directed by that other great visual stylist Jean-Jacques Beneix. It alsolacks the resonance of the post-holocaust Japanese biker gangs inKatsuhiro Otomo’s Akira)

Trouble is, this fascinating cross-cultural biker subculture is never reallyexplored (Mask it ain’t) nor are any of the myriad other potentially rivetingelements in the screenplay, which are unlikely to make sense to anyone whohasn’t either lived in Japan for a while or seen Paul and Leonard Schrader’sThe Yakuza, a movie which explains why Japanese gangsters cut off theirlittle fingers rather than assuming the audience already knows such thingswhen the act is presented on screen.

As discs go, Pioneer’s PAL Black Rain is impressive, scoringconsiderable points over the three sided NTSC version with not only twosides (cutting it pretty fine) but a perfectly chosen sidebreak inbetween.

Chaptering is sensible if sparse. Some of the Dolby Surround mixing isimpressive – an early bike race with noises whizzing left to right, a gangof Yakuza bikers circling a gaijin NYPD cop, an amazing Japanese policebuilding with telephones ringing and numerous conversations going on somewherein the background.

On the picture side, both transfer and image quality are faultless throughout.But in the end, good disc or not, this is still a rotten movie.

Film: 2/5
Picture: 5/5
Sound: 5/5