Rising Sun

A triumph of style over content. Like BLADE RUNNER, the film grafts a fiercely modernist feel onto characters and themes right out of a 1940s film noir--an impressive achievement that more than makes up for a ponderous storyline. Read full review

There is some elegant and clever filmmaking in Rising Sun. But ultimately Kaufman and Crichton are a bad fit: trying to transcend the material, the director loses the novelist's crude but compelling urgency. Read full review

What it all comes down to is that Kaufman gets the hard things right and messes up the simple stuff. If there isn't a Japanese saying for that, there certainly ought to be. Read full review

There’s a real spark to Connery’s performance, but except for that Kaufman has produced a middling contradiction, a thriller too polite to hit its target. Read full review

The screenplay by Kaufman, Crichton and Michael Backes is not about much of anything important, and Connery's deep penetrating wisdom takes away some of the suspense: If he knows everything that's going to happen, why keep us in the dark? Read full review

The film's mysteriousness is not profound. Anybody who hasn't guessed the killer's identity after 30 minutes should be forced to watch Rising Sun three times a day until Christmas. Read full review

The best seller's passions were misplaced, but in toning them down, the adaptation turns bland. Read full review

The sad thing about Rising Sun is that for all the controversy surrounding the book, it plays as just another cop drama set against an alien landscape. As so often happens in Hollywood these days, the alien locale is Los Angeles, an L.A. under assault from within and without. Rising Sun the movie doesn't have all that much to say about that condition. It sticks to the safe stuff. [30 July 1993, p.G4]

Snipes seems lost. A key player in the novel by virtue of his first-person narration, Snipes' character - now third-person - is all but a non-person. Mostly, he reacts Watson-style to Connery's Sherlock Holmes musings; an attempt to incorporate Snipes' street buddies into a car chase is the film's weakest scene. [30 July 1993, p.1D]

A wasted effort with a limp storyline that fails to do Michael Crichton's book justice. Read full review

Rising Sun waters down the more contentious aspects of Michael Crichton's controversial bestseller about Japanese influence in the United States, while remaining faithful to its mechanical plotting and superficial characterizations. Read full review

Connery lectures at length on his favourite subject, which wouldn't be so dull if the suspense was more adroitly handled, but Kaufman, regrettably, gets the pacing all wrong. Blowup-style video detection scenes provide a modicum of interest. Read full review