I've seen Osaka in a lot of movies, but it's never looked quite like this before, not even in violent thrillers. The director, Ridley Scott, must have been bewitched by memories of the futuristic Los Angeles he created for "Blade Runner" (1982). The difference is that in "Blade Runner" the characters inhabited their city, and in "Black Rain" they are crushed by it. The production design (by Norris Spencer) is so overwhelming that the characters seem lost and upstaged; frequently the humans are not even the most interesting things on the scene.
The film stars Michael Douglas as a detective with questionable ethics who captures a Japanese gangster after he commits a bloody double murder in New York. Douglas and his partner (Andy Garcia) are assigned to escort the killer (Yusaku Matsuda) back to Osaka, where they ineptly hand him over to his fellow gangsters, disguised as cops.
Determined to recapture the man, they team up with an Osaka cop (Ken Takakura), after which the plot settles down into a predictable routine.
The story of "Black Rain" is thin and prefabricated and doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, so Scott distracts us with overwrought visuals. After a motorcycle chase underneath a New York expressway, there's a foot chase through a meat locker, and then, in Japan, chases through underground parking garages and rain-swept plazas, before a gangster summit meeting is held in the fiery dungeon of a steel mill. (The opening motorcycle chase is the setup for another one at the end of the film, of course; the screenplay seems to have been manufactured out of those Xeroxed outlines they pass out in film school.) I would probably have enjoyed the visuals if they served any purpose (I admired the look of "Blade Runner"), but they're just showoff virtuosity. Other elements also seem shoe-horned into the movie for dubious reasons.
For example, the major supporting role for Kate Capshaw, as an Osaka bartender who apparently knows most of the secrets of the gangsters and feeds them to Douglas one at a time. I don't know whether to be annoyed by the implausible way in which an American woman has been slipped into a Japanese role or relieved that the movie spares us yet another set of geisha cliches. I doubt strongly, however, whether a blond from Chicago would know many Yakuza secrets, even after eight years of Osaka bartending.
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