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"Nothing better to do with your Sundays" than motorcycle racing beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, the joke is that it's Harley-Davidson versus Suzuki. The NYPD detective (Michael Douglas) has loose morals and a volatile temper, the beef with Internal Affairs gets interrupted by a yakuza upstart (Yusaku Matsuda) on a throat-slicing spree. "Interested observers," the cop and his partner (Andy Garcia) take the hood back to Osaka and mistakenly deliver him to his cohorts. The search uncovers a counterfeiting war, aid comes from straight-arrow inspector (Ken Takakura) and nightclub hostess (Kate Capshaw), who explains the local laughter around the bellicose gaijin: "Americans who are less than perfect, it's very amusing to them." Pollack's The Yakuza and Frankenheimer's The French Connection II, also Fuller's House of Bamboo and Kurosawa's Stray Dog, all pulped into a cascade of Ridley Scott gloss. A view from the plane introduces the Japanese city, tinted amid industrial smog to evoke a Martian outpost or an outtake from Antonioni's Red Desert. The screen is masked in shadows unless it's blasted by pachinko-parlor phosphorescence, streets at night are wet to better reflect welters of neon, throughout there's the tacit perception that the present has caught up with the futurism of Blade Runner. The human nucleus is Takakura as "Matsumoto the Mountie," who gets to play straight man to truculent Douglas, sing Ray Charles in a karaoke duet with Garcia, and snap the script's choicest line: "Now, music and movies are all America is good for!" The climax lights up a pastoral landscape with gunfire, though not before the oyabun (Tomisaburo Wakayama) provides a radioactive remembrance to connect with the concurrent Imamura film of the same name. "A love-hate relationship can last a very long time," Kaufman's Rising Sun brings it back home. Cinematography by Jan de Bont. With Shigeru Koyama, Guts Ishimatsu, Yuya Uchida, Miyuki Ono, Jun Kunimura, and John Spencer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |