Rid­ley Scott’s police thriller Black Rain (1989) opens in New York City at a time when The Meat­pack­ing Dis­trict actu­ally was a meat­pack­ing dis­trict. Tough cop Nick (Michael Dou­glas) is a ridicu­lously aggres­sive, foul-mouthed tough guy who tools around the city astride his crotch rocket. The despised Inter­nal Affairs depart­ment sus­pects him of being a bent cop­per (spoiler alert: rightly, it turns out!), and pres­sures him to name names. By sheer acci­dent, he and rookie part­ner Char­lie (Andy Gar­cia) wit­ness a Yakuza assas­si­na­tion in a Meat­pack­ing Dis­trict bar. After a thrilling chase through some vin­tage Man­hat­tan loca­tions since replaced by night­clubs, lux­ury con­dos, and The Apple Store, they man­age to appre­hend the per­pe­tra­tor. The Yakuza assas­sin Sato (Yasaku Mat­suda), being Asian in a Hol­ly­wood movie, is of course a mar­tial arts expert. Con­trived plot machi­na­tions result in Nick and Char­lie escort­ing Sato back to Japan, where­upon they imme­di­ately and embar­rass­ingly lose him. By this point, the plot has been con­structed in such a way as to raise Nick’s stakes to the high­est level pos­si­ble: the only two things that mat­ter to him, his honor and job secu­rity, depend on one task: catch­ing or killing the bad guy. If he returns to the States empty-handed, he’s almost cer­tainly to be disgraced.

Andy Gar­cia refuses to pass the edamame

In his Tokyo down­time, Nick enter­tains an uncon­sum­mated romance with gai­jin Joyce (Kate Cap­shaw). The sub­plot is a bor­ing dis­trac­tion. Joyce is a mere love inter­est in the worst sto­ry­telling sense: her char­ac­ter is not inte­grated into the main thriller plot as is the female lead in Scott’s Some­one to Watch Over Me. It strikes this Dork Reporter as some­thing of a copout on the part of Scott and screen­writ­ers Craig Bolotin and War­ren Lewis that their pro­tag­o­nist Nick goes all the way to Japan but doesn’t do as the Japan­ese men do (which is to say, Japan­ese women).

Nick and Char­lie part­ner with upright Japan­ese cop Masahiro (Ken Takakura). Cul­tures clash, and the suave Char­lie teaches the uptight Masahiro to party hearty, beat­ing the Japan­ese at their own game (that being karaōke). When Nick’s moral ambi­gu­ity becomes known, the right­eous Masahiro seems to con­vince Nick that theft of any sort is shame­ful. But in the end, it is Nick that teaches Masahiro that it’s OK to steal from crim­i­nals (in the moral uni­verse of this film, at least). I’d never say that any work of fic­tion has an oblig­a­tion to present morally-correct behav­ior (the kind of cen­sor­ship that Hol­ly­wood the­o­ret­i­cally left behind with the demise of the Pro­duc­tion Code). But Black Rain seems to present Nick’s amoral behav­ior as The Right Thing, instead of the com­pli­cated actions of an inter­est­ing com­plex character.

A back­lit Michael Dou­glas con­tem­plates a new hairdo

Scott stages a huge shootout sequence at a refin­ery, seem­ingly cho­sen for max­i­mum visual appeal (pic­ture the clouds of steam, show­ers of sparks, bursts of flame, etc.). In a kind of self-referencial closed cir­cuit, Scott’s aer­ial shots of Japan look just like Blade Runner’s futur­is­tic dystopian Los Ange­les, which was itself inspired by Tokyo. Another direct lift from Blade Run­ner: Nick dis­cov­ers sequins from Joyce’s dress at a crime scene, recall­ing the sequence in Blade Run­ner in which Deckard tracks down the ori­gin of syn­thetic snake scales — belong­ing, of course, to one of cinema’s most famous femmes fatale.

The open­ing cred­its state “In asso­ci­a­tion with Michael Dou­glas.” Dou­glas is of course a suc­cess­ful pro­ducer (for instance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest), but Black Rain has the feel of an ego trip. More trivia: the direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Jan de Bont was later to direct Speed.

One final cheap shot before I go. I don’t know what has dated more: the cheesy music or Michael Dou­glas’ big hair.

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report: