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]