Black Rain

Rain is a 126-minute genre movie stacked for effect; when you see Douglas racing his motorcycle at the beginning, you know what the climax will be. Scott, though, may be the definitive state-of-the-art moviemaker right now - and violent Rain is the most aggressively cinematic movie in a while. [22 Sep 1989, p.1D]

This gripping crime thriller about hardboiled NY cop Michael Douglas tracking a yakuza hood in Osaka, Japan, boasts magnificent lensing and powerfully baroque production design.

It's risky making an action picture that breaks its violent stride to emphasize the difficulties of living up to preconceived ideas of masculinity. But it's that risk that makes Black Rain distinctive. By refusing to beat its Eastern and Western protagonists into comic-book pulp, the movie pays them, and the audience, a rare compliment. Read full review

Black Rain is a brilliant visual tour de force wrapped around a fair suspense plot. The result is a movie that is so exciting to look at that you tend to forget that the story is rather hackneyed, except for the setting. [26 Sep 1989, p.3D]

In Black Rain, director Ridley Scott and his team pump in so much pyrotechnic razzle-dazzle that the movie becomes a triumph of matter over mind. It's a blast of pure sensation, shallow but scintillating, like a great rock melody, superbly produced, where the music pumps you up even as the lyrics drag you down. Read full review

At a little over two hours, Black Rain is a good half-hour too long, and the style gymnastics are eventually wearying. But Scott's work is always fascinating to watch, even as it grinds you down. And Douglas now has something heroic about him that enhances, if it doesn't quite transcend, the plot-by- numbers. It's fun watching the two of them volley. [22 Sep 1989, p.G5]

Black Rain is really an extended exercise in pure style, a pretty picture in constant motion painted by a very commercial artist. In fact, the style is so uncontaminated by substance that everything here - plot, character, theme - gets subordinated to the glitzy sights and ambient sounds. [22 Sep 1989]

No matter how well dressed, the movie can’t escape the gravitational pull of formula. Without a convincing subtext, Black Rain is pretty dull fare indeed. Read full review

Black Rain is chock-full of moments, jazzy scenery and snazzy bits of dialogue, and stuffed with steroids. It's big, maybe too big for its shallow notions and commonplace structure. But it is also beautiful and terrible in the same ways that other Scott movies have been eye-filling. With its teeming Asian landscape, its dark kaleidoscopic palette and its heavily layered composition, it's reminiscent of Blade Runner. But this is an atmosphere that needs Sam Spade, not Dirty Harry. Read full review

The story of Black Rain is thin and prefabricated and doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, so Scott distracts us with overwrought visuals. Read full review

At its best, Black Rain has the glitzy quality of an extremely long and clever television commercial. One can't be sure what is being sold, but the eye isn't bored. Read full review

Director Ridley Scott's visual gifts are still evident in Black Rain. But with retread plot and characters, Scott's stylistic flourishes become irritating clutter. Read full review

Ridley Scott directed this 1989 feature, and while there's a lot of his characteristic atmospherics—smoke, fog, neon, yellow light, rain, and squalor—to 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. Read full review

Visually, the film is at its most interesting when Scott's camera rises over Osaka and photographs it in ways that make it look like a modular electrified Lego city with neon and plexiglass trim. We get the feeling that in Osaka we're staring the near future in the face. But if Scott has gone to Osaka in search of a new Blade Runner, he comes up with nothing more than an Asian French Connection II. Many exchanges play like truncated pieces of scenes that originally existed more fully. And the film's frequent nocturnal motorcycle revvings don't have the panache of The Warriors, much less The Wild One. [22 Sep 1989, p.31]

The crosscultural action picture might have worked if the filmmakers had come up with a script in which Douglas' character had been rendered weak and confused by being a fish trying to swim in strange waters. But instead he is presented as a traditional action hero dominating everyone in sight. The cultural imperialism of that decision makes for a routine and frequently offensive story full of Asian stereotypes. Director Scott (Blade Runner, Alien) certainly knows how to photograph arresting architecture, but the high-gloss look of Black Rain only intensifies the shortcomings of the pedestrian story. Read full review

Director Ridley Scott's Black Rain belongs to the blunt instrument school of filmmaking. This cop thriller, set largely in Osaka, Japan, is so full of screeching tires, flashing neon and extravagant violence that it's almost physically painful to watch, yet that seems to be the effect the director had in mind. If you smack the audience around enough, you'll be respected for your power. Read full review

While there is an undeniable beauty in the film's images and a measure of energy from the exotic perfume of the people and places, Black Rain is in the end a cop movie, with a particularly pedestrian story to boot. [22 Sep 1989, p.6]

Black Rain is the sort of movie where, if you see a motorcycle race at the start, you know you'll get one in the climax. The script is routine formula swill, at best. [02 Oct 1989, p.70]