Black Rain Movie Download

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Two NYC cops arrest a Yakuza member and must escort him when he's extradited to Japan.
When a member of the Japanese Yakuza is arrested in New York, detectives Nick Conklin and Charlie Vincent are assigned to escort him to Japan. Conklin in particular is none too pleased that they are not prosecuting the prisoner themselves. They no sooner arrive in Japan however than they are duped and turn their prisoner over to gangsters posing as police. The detectives stay on in Japan hoping to work with their Japanese counterparts but have some difficulty dealing with local protocol and customs. Over time, Conklin develops a working relationship with Detective Masahiro and together they manage to ensure justice is served.
BLACK RAIN is one of those underrated films that few people have heard of, let alone seen. It manages to exist on a number of levels, as a superbly competent action thriller, and as a cultural study into the relationship between the U.S. and Japan. It manages to exist on these multiple levels without sacrificing any for the good of another. It has at its center a complex spherical character in Michael Douglas' Nick Conklin. Nick is at first glance another bad-to-the-bone hard-boiled cop who wears a leather jacket, rides a Harley and shuns authority. Underneath, however, lies a man who is devoted to his children, and his personal integrity, who is now forced to struggle with the choices he has made. There are also strong supporting characters in Charlie Vincent and Masahiro Matsumoto, played by Andy Garcia and Ken Takakura respectively. Charlie is Nick's anchor, keeping him reigned in in front of authority, who tries not to take things as seriously as Nick except his job and his devotion to his partner. Mas is a man who stresses honor and propriety, who is at first repelled by Nick and his ways. As the film progresses, he comes to a greater understanding of Nick, and comes to respect him as a cop, as a man of honor, and as a friend. On top of all these elements, the film also delves into cross-cultural issues, namely how Japan and the U.S. are different in terms of politics, police procedure, and organized crime. It spends some time on the mutual exclusivity of these two cultures, how one cannot exist without the other, and how the have helped shape and form one another over many years without favoring one or the other. All these things combined the film still manages to maintain itself as a highly competent action thriller, with taught suspenseful pacing, and an intelligent storyline. It also contains one of the best and most memorable endings in recent years, which alone makes the film worth watching. Overall, I highly recommend this film to anyone who might enjoy this unconventional type of cops-and-gangsters film, a film with depth and intelligence. If you do, chances are this surprisingly excellent film will become one of your favorites as well.
When Ridley Scott filmed Black Rain in Japan and got some top players in the Japanese cinema to appear in it, it was at a time when relations between Japan and the USA were tense. Japan was in the midst of an economic boom that got a lot in America quite jealous. Can't really blame them that much as Japan's prosperity was due to American protection because Japan spent a pittance on a defense budget as compared to what we spend. When the Japanese boom eventually went bust ironically things got a whole lot better. Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia are a pair of American cops who arrest a top Yakuza boss right in New York. They'd like to keep him here, but are ordered to extradite him to Japan as a matter of good will, sorely needed in 1989. Upon landing in Osaka they lose the prisoner and I won't say how. Garcia's all for going back to New York and face their music but Douglas wants to get him back. It costs Garcia his life. Some elements of the Robert Taylor/George Raft police drama Rogue Cop are present here. Douglas is a cop who at a minimum shuts his eyes to corruption and Internal Affairs is on his case. Garcia is relatively new and a Boy Scout. He's more in line with the Japanese who according to Black Rain just don't have corruption. It's all about honor and saving face in their tradition. Douglas teams up with Japanese detective Ken Takahara and they take down a pair of feuding Yakuzas more in an American movie style shootout. Michael Douglas plays well of both Andy Garcia and Ken Takahara, their scenes have both bite and poignancy. The feuding Japanese Yakuza are played by Tomisaburo Wakayama as the older and Yusaku Matsuda as the younger and more evil and violent. Matsuda was in fact dying of cancer when he took on the role in Black Rain. I suspect a whole lot more doubling than usual was working here. Black Rain is surely dated now that America and Japan seem to be back on track together again. It's still a good action film with some fine acting by Michael Douglas and the rest of the cast.
Ridley Scott directed this 1989 feature, and while there's a lot of his characteristic atmospherics—smoke, fog, neon, yellow light, rain, and squalor—to fill all the dead spaces, he's still a long way from the splendors of Blade Runner. The script by Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis doesn't give him or Douglas very much to chew on, apart from a lot of unpleasant xenophobia about Japanese gangsters, and the plot never gets far beyond the formulaic and the forgettable, hammered into place by Hans Zimmer's pounding and numbing score.
It's part of the bushido code of conduct that the ancient samurai and the yakuza gangsters adhere to. During the days of the Japanese warlords and the samurai, a dishonorable act carried the punishment of severing one's own finger or part of. The idea was that a samurai that was missing part of a finger or multiple fingers wouldn't be able to wield his katana (samurai sword) as effectively. The Japanese word for the act is yubitsume. On August 6th and 9th, 1945, during World War II, the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. The first, on August 6th, was the western city of Hiroshima, which had been a major Japanese shipping port and industrial production site. The second bomb was dropped on another western city, Nagasaki, three days later when Emperor Hirohito refused to surrender. Following the devastation of those bombings, Hirohito ordered his country's surrender, ending the United States' war with Japan. Sugai's involvement in this chain of events is that he lived in one of those cities -- which city is not revealed -- as a boy and was there when the bomb was dropped. As he states "I was 10 when the B-29 came. We were underground for three days. When we came up, the city was gone. Then the heat brought rain; black rain." What Sugai is suggesting is that the pollution from the atomic fallout had somehow turned the rain black. Sugai goes on to say that following the war American values were forced on to his people by the United States, who had agreed to aid in the rebuilding of Japanese society due to the destruction caused not only by the atomic bombings but also from the many other non-atomic bombings of other Japanese cities during the war in the Pacific. The United States became Japan's occupying force following the war and Japanese citizens like Sugai felt that their cultural and societal identity was slowly being stolen from them as a result of such policies. Sugai's ultimate plan is to flood the American economy with counterfeit money and reap the benefits of such a crime. a5c7b9f00b

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