Jeremy Clarke reviews

Distributed by
Pioneer LDCE

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

On paper, Ridley Scott's Black Rain reads like a winner: a police action thriller with Michael Douglas and sidekick Andy Garcia (then a little known star in the ascendant) as an NYPD cop hunting a villain in Japan.

Where the film scores heavily is on the visual style level; this is BladeRunner imagery without the superficial Sci-Fi megabudget special effects overlay. Or plot. The film looks startling throughout, due in part to Scott's collaboration with Dutch cinematographer Jan De Bont (later director of Twister, not to mention Speed and its sequel); every frame is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, Scott is not shooting a Hovis commercial here and we need a rather more substantial screenplay - such as Alien or the extraordinary Thelma and Louise - than the flimsy sketch on which Scott hangs his current images. Generally, though, Michael Douglas - and the rest of the cast including the versatile Kate Capshaw (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)- are wasted.

Things start off well enough with a leather-jacketed Michael Douglas racing 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 sure enough, 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 also lacks the resonance of the post-holocaust Japanese biker gangs in Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira)

Trouble is, this fascinating cross-cultural biker subculture is never really explored (Mask it ain't) nor are any of the myriad other potentially riveting elements in the screenplay, which are unlikely to make sense to anyone who hasn't either lived in Japan for a while or seen Paul and Leonard Schrader's The Yakuza, a movie which explains why Japanese gangsters cut off their little fingers rather than assuming the audience already knows such things when the act is presented on screen.

As discs go, Pioneer's PAL Black Rain is impressive, scoring considerable points over the three sided NTSC version with not only two sides (cutting it pretty fine) but a perfectly chosen sidebreak in between.

Chaptering is sensible if sparse. Some of the Dolby Surround mixing is impressive - an early bike race with noises whizzing left to right, a gang of Yakuza bikers circling a gaijin NYPD cop, an amazing Japanese police building with telephones ringing and numerous conversations going on somewhere in 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

Review copyright © Jeremy Clarke, 1997.