Product Details

• Actors: Michael Douglas, Andy Garcia, Ken Takakura, Kate Capshaw, Yusaku Matsuda
• Directors: Ridley Scott
• Writers: Craig Bolotin, Warren Lewis
• Producers: Alan Poul, Craig Bolotin, Julie Kirkham, Sherry Lansing, Stanley R. Jaffe
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Paramount
• DVD Release Date: February 16, 1999
• Run Time: 125 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6305278016
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #45,654 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #33 in	Movies & TV > Action & Adventure > Action Directors > Ridley Scott
  #36 in	Movies & TV > Action & Adventure > Action Stars > Michael Douglas

• For more information about "Black Rain" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com essential video

A guilty pleasure if ever there was one, Black Rain is a ridiculously entertaining thriller by Ridley Scott (Alien), starring Michael Douglas as a tough New York cop who--along with his partner (Andy Garcia)--goes to Japan to deliver a local mobster. When the latter escapes, Douglas's brand of gonzo crime fighting rubs his Japanese hosts the wrong way. Slick, mechanistic, and absurd, the film is all surface action and attitude (not to mention Scott's incredibly busy, trademark art direction); and one can get lost in the sheer indulgence of it. However, if you can buy Douglas as an iconoclastic lawman, you can buy anything else here, including the notion of Kate Capshaw as a blonde escort highly desired by Japanese businessmen. --Tom Keogh

Amazon.com

Cultures clash (and so, occasionally, do clichés) in this 1989 stylefest from director Ridley Scott. Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia are New York cops who grab a Japanese mobster and take him back to Osaka--only to lose him there. When they're forced to track him down, Douglas's knuckles-and-know-how approach to crime-fighting puts him at odds with his Japanese handlers. Beside eschewing police brutality, their code of honor also induces guilt because Douglas has succumbed to the occasional shifty tendency in the past. Despite some strong action sequences and Scott's trademark look of neon reflected on wet streets, it begins to drag and ends up exactly where you expect it to--with Douglas chin-to-chin with chief bad guy Yusaku Matsuda. No one plays a flawed hero better than Douglas but this one tends to be by the numbers. --Marshall Fine

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A guilt-free pleasure, December 27, 2003

By	John S. Ryan "Scott Ryan" (Silver Lake, OH) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I'm not sure why this movie is described as a 'guilty pleasure'. I don't feel at all bad about liking it. And I do like it, a lot.

For one thing, I like Michael Douglas. I liked him thirty years ago in _The Streets of San Francisco_, I liked him even better after he turned _One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest_ from a great book and a great stage play into a great motion picture, and I've kept right on liking him every time he's gotten himself cast in a stylish, well-scripted film.

And this _is_ a stylish, well-scripted film. It's every bit as dark as you expect from Ridley Scott, and although there's a fairly well-defined villain, the 'heroes' are morally ambiguous. I like that in a movie.

The reviewers who say Michael Douglas's character Nick Conklin is an 'ugly American' are right, but they seem to have missed the fact that this is part of the point. This film is a fairly ambitious, though not terribly deep, attempt to bring off an East-meets-West theme in what looks superficially like just another buddy-cop movie. The 'black rain' of the title is one of the aftereffects of the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it's the symbolic stand-in for the Western 'decadence' bemoaned by the more traditional Nipponese (even the crime bosses).

But that doesn't mean Japan wins the dramatic argument. On the contrary, the Nipponese cop (played with endearing self-effacement by Ken Takakura) learns a few things from his new cowboy friend 'Nick-san' too. (And the karaoke scene with Takakura and Andy Garcia is priceless.)

Kate Capshaw doesn't really need an excuse to appear in a film, and that's good, because here she doesn't really have one. She's an expatriate American who inexplicably keeps turning up at the center of the action. She gives the film a bit of _Casablanca_-like flavor, but it's more a matter of mood than anything else.

I won't tell you anything about the plot except that it involves the Japanese underworld and that it zips along at a fast clip. Don't look away or you'll miss something.

The whole thing is rendered most atmospherically, with the sort of dark and brooding edge that I like in a film (and at which Ridley Scott excels). In general I'm not the biggest fan of Hans Zimmer's scores, but for the most part he's used pretty effectively here.

This is a first-rate action-adventure thriller, and I don't feel the slightest bit 'guilty' for taking a very great deal of pleasure in it.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Paramount hasn't done justice to BLACK RAIN !, April 18, 2006

By	ABI ALY "DAVE" (Jakarta,Indonesia) - See all my reviews

I really enjoyed this when I watched it back at the cinema in 1989.Last year I found out that it was available on dvd and made the purchase without prior knowledge of the picture quality.The film still impresses me but I am very much disappointed with the picture quality,which is grainy and has fading color. It's a pity Paramount has overlooked this film.I am looking forward to seeing a SPECIAL COLLECTOR'S EDITION release which includes:an anamorphic widescreen transfer,a Dolby Digital 5.1 EX sound,English subtitle(the current one doesn't even have this standard feature!),audio commentary with Ridley Scott and/or Michael Douglas,interviews,or other featurettes of the film. What do you say PARAMOUNT ?

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A 'Rising Sun'-like bubble film and a guilty pleasure, January 13, 2005

By	Andy Orrock (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

'Black Rain' came out in 1989. It's shown a lot of legs (it was on HBO last weekend) for two reasons: first and foremost, it's a Ridley Scott film, nuff said; second, it is - as the amazon reviewer pointed out - a wonderfully guilty pleasure, featuring such delightful absurdities as Kate Capeshaw (Mrs. Steven Spielberg, for god's sake) crammed into some va-va-voom sequined outfit, and sportin' some seriously tousled Big 80s hair. And speaking of big hair, that's one excellent mullet being chaperoned around by Michael Douglas. It is, after all, 1989.

I'll put this film in the same category as Philip Kaufman's 'Rising Sun' - 1989 was the height (of absurdity, as it turns out) of the Japanese bubble economy, and Japan-focused films of this age spoke to the fear or at least latent concern about the Japanese economic model eventually besting the US model. So, in light of a dramatically different Japan circa 2005, 'Black Rain' looks a little over the top. But, hey, this is a movie, and this is Ridely Scott. You want subtlety? Look elsewhere.

The real star of the film (if you can look around Mr. Douglas' most excellent rants and rages) is regal Japanese star Ken Takakura as Detective Masahiro. His IMDB filmography lists 130 substantial roles in his prolific history and calls him "the Clint Eastwood of Japan," not faint praise in anyone's book. Mr. Takahura literally holds the film together, acting as the bridge between the Douglas/Garcia side of the film, and the Japanese side of the film. It's great work.