A couple American cops escort a Japanese gangster back to Japan only to end up chasing him all over Osaka in Ridley Scott's 1989 film Black Rain. I'm used to western films getting basically nothing right about Japan so I was fascinated by how accurate this movie is about the location and especially the culture. It's almost too accurate because it becomes highly implausible that fish out of water Michael Douglas as the lead cop can ever be even remotely useful on the streets of a Japanese city. But there are some incredible action sequences in this movie complemented by one of the best Hans Zimmer scores I've ever heard.
The action begins in New York where Michael Douglas plays Nick Conklin, your typical maverick '80s American movie cop who's always pissing off his chief. This first act establishes he's really good on a motorcycle with a terrific race sequence along the wharf. You know it's going to pay off later but that makes it no less satisfying when it does.
Nick's partner is a young guy named Charlie (Andy Garcia) and the two of them are in a bar when they witness a group of yakuza execute a hit on the premises. There's a foot chase and Nick catches the leader, which leads to he and Charlie landing the job of escorting the guy overseas. But the guy almost immediately escapes once they're on Japanese soil. Nick, who's anathema to American protocols, is completely at odds with Japanese police procedure and I was amazed he even succeeded in being granted observer status. He's given a minder named Matsumoto (Takakura Ken) who's real job is to minimise the Americans' involvement. They really only start to gain a little ground because Matsumoto warms to Charlie's generous nature and Nick meets an American woman, Joyce (Kate Capshaw), working as a hostess in one of the clubs. She gives him some insight including one line that was so accurate it was in fact a thought I often had working in Japan; "Yes means no." Which in Nick's case, when he's told he can observe, it actually means he's been granted zero access.
Ridley Scott wanted to shoot entirely on location but found the red tape in Japan to be insurmountable, a problem that has stymied many a foreign production attempting to operate in Japan. Although most of the footage was shot in Osaka and Kobe, Scott was obliged late in production to take it overseas and the film's climax was shot in Napa Valley, California. But unlike John Wick, which gives a pretty poor imitation of Umeda Station, Scott recreated the cathedral-like interior of Hankyu Department Store (connected to Umeda Station) so well in Los Angeles I thought it was actually some of the location footage until I read the Wikipedia entry. I bet it would have been impossible to get permission for a guy to ride a motorcycle around in it as we see in the film.
It never comes off as plausible that Nick's able to make valuable contributions to the investigation in Osaka but it's still a pretty exciting action movie with some genuine insight on Japanese culture. Black Rain is available on Amazon Prime.
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