I SUPPOSE WE'LL HAVE TO REGISTER YOU AS A LETHAL WEAPON

Charting the supernarrative of a movie franchise is often kind of like watching a game of telephone played by a lot of rich people on cocaine. Invariably, after three or so sequels, the thing that started everything off—the first movie—is forgotten, and the franchise itself becomes an entity, rather than its individual parts mattering all that much. And by the last movie in the series, any resemblance to the original installment is cosmetic as best.

The Lethal Weapon series, weirdly, is not one of these cases. The evolution of the Lethal Weapon series into the cute & cuddly “we all love working on these movies and each other” denouement of the fourth movie, where the theme of family saw its conclusion as the characters' families of blood and choice paralleled the sense of the actors and crew being one big family, is mirrored within the first movie, when you look at it closely, and in the first movie's development from first draft to wrapped picture.

Starting as a very dark spec script by recent UCLA graduate Shane Black in the mid-80s, Lethal Weapon was written as a calling card in the “high concept” fashion that had come into fashion that decade. The high concept, originally, was roughly along the lines of “what if Travis Bickle was a cop [instead of a taxi driver]?” Protagonist, Vietnam vet narcotics cop Martin Riggs, is a deeply fucked up individual with no concern for his life in these early drafts, and is a genuinely dangerous entity on the LAPD.

In contrast to the assumed, faceless executive sending a memo with some asinine note like “can we make it funnier?” the way Lethal Weapon became a buddy action/comedy instead of Taxi Driver-on-the-LAPD was not a decision but an accident of casting. Casting director Marion Dougherty went like, “all right, I need a really crazy motherfucker . . . well, that's Mel Gibson.” Done and done.

That part makes perfect sense, since we all know Mel Gibson's crazy. The truly inspired choice Dougherty made was Danny Glover. In the original script, Murtaugh's race isn't specified, which generally means laziness and (to be generous, maybe unintentional) racism dictate “white guy.” Aside from the unusually progressive “hey, how about this guy” thought, the fact that she came up with this idea watching Danny Glover play the worst person in the universe in The Color Purple is a sign Marion Dougherty was damn good at her job. When Mel Gibson and Danny Glover got in the room with director Richard Donner, they clicked immediately and it was set.

It was the powerful chemistry between the two actors that steered the movie in a lighter direction, as their natural dynamic lent itself to banter and ball-busting. Without all that many major structural changes, Shane Black's pitch-dark cop nightmare movie about one guy became the definitive buddy cop movie. The moral of the story: never underrate the importance of casting in movies.

It was thus that Lethal Weapon as we know it came to be. Shane Black would later complain (with good cause in some cases) about his work being polluted by the studio development process, and by notes from studio executives motivated more by profit than art. In Lethal Weapon's case, though, a certain degree of lightness arguably helped the picture.



The parade of imitators that followed makes it easy to forget, almost a quarter-century after its release, how massive Lethal Weapon was upon its initial release. There had been buddy pictures (of which 48 Hrs must be considered the standard bearer), and there had certainly been action pictures (one love, Arnold), and there had even been action/comedies (Beverly Hills Cop, of course), but Lethal Weapon was the first picture to merge all of these elements together to create a gleaming alloy of fucking badass.

What sets the first picture apart from the rest of the series is that Lethal Weapon, despite having some funny bits, is most assuredly an action picture first, second, and third, and maybe a comedy fourth, or fifth. There is some seriously fucked-up shit in Lethal Weapon. The whole thing about the cop hero being a loose cannon who doesn't play by the rules became first a cliché and then word salad after a couple decades of le cinema de let's-fucking-blow-shit-up, but Martin Riggs (Mel) is 12 kilometers out of his fucking mind (Ed. Note: you need the metric system to measure the shit; dude is out there). The theatrical cut introduces Mel in a lot full of Christmas trees (a nice touch in LA, as is the fact that the scene is shot with magic hour Pacific sunshine) trying to buy some cocaine off a bunch of knuckleheads.

Drug Dealer #3: [Riggs is in a Christmas tree lot, and pretends to sample some coke for a buy] Good, huh? Tasty? Smooth?
Martin Riggs: Yeah, that's good...
Drug Dealer #1: [walking up with a beer] Here ya go, pal...
Martin Riggs: Thanks. Okay, so let's do it. How much?
Drug Dealer #3: How much for how much?
Martin Riggs: For all of it.
Drug Dealer #3: You want it all. He wants it all.
Drug Dealer #1: He wants it all, beautiful. Congratulations!
Drug Dealer #3: All right!
Martin Riggs: Maybe a nice six footer to put it under, huh?
Drug Dealer #2: You want a tree? I'll tell you what. I'll give you the best tree I got on the lot, for nothin'. But the shit's gonna cost ya... a hundred.
Martin Riggs: What, that much?
Drug Dealer #3: Hey, you said you liked it, that's a fair price.
Martin Riggs: Yeah... yeah! Hell, you only live once... get this together here...
[takes out his wallet, starts counting out a hundred dollars]
Martin Riggs: Twenty, forty, sixty, seventy...
Drug Dealer #1: Hey, what the fuck...
Drug Dealer #2: Hey, man... Hey!
Martin Riggs: C'mon, shut up man, I'm losin' count... Ninety-three, ninety-four, ninety...
Drug Dealer #2: Forget it, you dumbshit. One hundred THOUSAND. One hundred THOUSAND, DOLLARS!
Martin Riggs: A hundred thousand?
[laughs]
Martin Riggs: I'm sorry, I can't afford that, not on my salary. But I'll tell ya what, I got a better idea, here. Let me say I take the whole stash of your hands for free, and you assholes can go to jail.
[takes out his badge and puts it on the table in front of them]
Martin Riggs: What do you say about that? Now I could read you guys your rights, but ah, you guys already know what your rights are, don't you?
Drug Dealer #2: [drug dealers stare, then start to laugh] This badge ain't real. YOU ain't real.
Drug Dealer #1: No, but you sure are a crazy son of a bitch!
Martin Riggs: [They all laugh] You think I'm crazy? You call me crazy, you think I'm crazy? You wanna see crazy?
[Riggs starts slapping him self on the head, Stooges style, then pokes their eyes and slaps them, and pulls out his gun]
Martin Riggs: . Now that's a real badge, I'm a real cop, and this is a real fucking gun!
Drug Dealer #2: [menacing] Okay, pal...
Martin Riggs: Hey, noses in the dirt, asshole...
[And the guns start blazin']

(Ed. Note: all asides courtesy of imdb)

Mel, that whole scene, right up until he pulls his heat, has this cracked, alien, child-like vibe. The dialogue itself is pretty standard tough-guy stuff, but his delivery is straight up Martian. It's a little disconcerting, as is the fact that in the ensuing fracas, he lights up two or three of the bad guys without blinking and is about to blow the last one's brains out at point blank range, and a very nervous SWAT guy has to try and calm Mel down with a “it ain't worth it, man.” It's an intense scene, and conveys Mel's insanity as a very real, vivid thing. There was an earlier scene in the extended director's cut (which doesn't really serve any purpose other than making the first act twice as long) where Mel walks straight into a situation where a sniper is holding some kids hostage, and just walks slowly with the thousand yard stare in his eyes and just fucking ices the sniper. It's a great scene, regrettably superfluous, but it firmly establishes Mel as so fucking crazy he's barely in control, if he even is.

Danny Glover and the rest of the Murtaugh family, by contrast, are the model of the stable, healthy, American nuclear family. He's turning 50, his wife's a shitty cook, his kids are wiseasses and his (drop dead gorgeous) daughter is starting to date. Total square-ass, good cop. The story is set in motion when the daughter of Danny Glover's old Vietnam buddy (Tom Atkins) jumps naked off a high-rise balcony with a bloodstream full of drain cleaner-laced drugs. His grumpy captain (Steve Kahan; minor aside, I always wondered why Steve Kahan wasn't the grumpy captain in everything, because he's fucking awesome, but it turns out he's Richard Donner's cousin so he mostly only acts when cousin Rich calls him up and says “what up cuz, I need a middle-aged/old white guy to be awesome, you free?” and he goes “Sure!”) decides he needs a partner. Danny Glover, upon seeing Mel, immediately goes “bad guy” and when Mel gets out his gun to check the action or something, he goes “GUN!” and ultimately gets judo'd to the floor by Mel. “Meet your new partner,” says random other cop Grand L. Bush with a smirk.

Unlike most other random mismatched buddy pairings, which actually are random due to the movies being shitty, the contrast between Danny and Mel has relevant implications for the story. One is the thing that most buddy movies that bother to give a fuck about character development do, where each character helps the other. In Lethal Weapon's case that means Mel's fly by the seat of his ass wildman approach helps Danny Glover loosen up slightly and embrace his inner badass, and Mel manages to conquer his crippling isolation and suicidal depression over the death of his wife and rejoin the human race. Neither involves the kind of cartoonish transformation that one sees in lesser pictures, as both are plausibly enough drawn that the reciprocity makes them a good team rather than two completely different people.

The other major one is the Vietnam connection. Both of them are vets, but Danny Glover was in the early, “military advisors,” Gulf of Tonkin era of the war, and Mel was deep in the shit in the post-Tet, My Lai, Walter Cronkite openly going on TV and calling the war unwinnable part. This common ground gives them a grounds for mutual respect (leading to eventual harmonious partnership), and also ties in nicely with the villain's drug conspiracy.

This is another thing that sets Lethal Weapon apart: the shit its bad guys get up to is something that actually happened. One of the darker (and poorly kept) secrets of the Vietnam War was the drug business the CIA was doing it Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was highly profitable, and largely responsible, due to enterprising servicemen like Frank (American Gangster) Lucas, for the greater availability of illegal drugs in the United States from the 70s on. Now, a certain amount of poetic license was taken in the movie; the CIA does not fly around in helicopters on American soil and silence their bankers by machine gunning them through the window of their oceanside mansions. But Gary Busey's trick of holding his forearm over a lit cigarette lighter without flinching is straight up G. Gordon Liddy, for more historical relevance.

Of course, for all this talk of verisimilitude, Lethal Weapon is still an action movie, not a documentary. Mel is a supernatural shot with a pistol: the scene where he and Danny are yakking about this hooker who might have hotshot and/or pushed the naked suicidal daughter out the window on the shooting range, and Mel shoots a smiley face onto his target from like a gajillion yards out . . . it's awesome, and it's a great sight gag, but it is bullshit. Danny Glover gets all sadface about the fact that he can only hit dead center of the target off a quick draw, which is actually about as awesome a pistol shot as one can be in real life. But, like I said, it's an action movie. The verisimilitude is there to make it easier for us to suspend our disbelief. Which is as it should be.

Lethal Weapon is a little rough around the edges in terms of execution, something that helps emphasize its real-ishness. Danny Glover's performance is really kind of wonderful; his flat line readings used to bug me occasionally way back when, but repeated viewings (and oh how repeated those viewings have been) have led me to consider the awkwardness of some of his delivery as an aspect of his regular guy square-ass character. That guy is not smooth. If, for some bizarre reason, he calls Mel “you crazy son of a . . . [5 second pause] . . . bitch!” (I'm not exactly sure whether that was from the first one or one of the sequels, but that doesn't matter) it's not shitty acting. He's playing a guy who would say random shit really awkwardly.

And then there's Mel. Everyone is legitimately a little scared of Mel, as they should be, because he's nucking futs. That bit where he talks the jumper out of jumping off the building—which, by the way, is one of Lethal Weapon's departures from versimilitude—and then handcuffs the guy and jumps off the roof with him, to land in the gigantic airbag . . . well, okay. Let's back up. That scene is really fucking stupid, and I say that as an avowed lover of Lethal Weapon. First, if the cops had inflated a gigantic airbag right underneath where the dude was jumping, what does it matter if he jumps? Forget whether those things work in real life, whether you'd actually break a leg if you jumped on one or your neck if you got the angle wrong (shit, bulletproof vests stop everything short of a tactical nuke in movies). Clearly, in movie world, they work, because Mel jumps him into it and neither of them so much as have a hair out of place. So why does Danny Glover get all bent out of shape about Mel being suicidal, based on that? Mel has one of his better points in the whole movie: “You wanted him down, he's down.” Sure, it's an example of reckless behavior, from which I'm sure Danny Glover extrapolated and got the suicide thing (also, we did see Mel think about eating his gun in that one fucked up amazingly well-done scene earlier). And it leads to Mel's great speech about the job being the only thing that keeps him from checking out. So yeah, whatever, nevermind, the denouement to the jumper scene is great, but the scene itself reeked more of “we need something suspenseful here because it's the x minute mark” rather than it being legitimately necessary.

Once Mel and Danny go up against Gary Busey and the Special Forces All-Stars (led by asshole general Mitchell Ryan in a fucking rock solid Evil White Guy performance that he managed to pull off without even wearing a Suit . . . even though you know damn well he's got some really really conservative ones in his closet back home) shit gets real. The showdown in the desert is awesome. Mel has taken a shotgun blast in the chest and is presumed, by the evil white guys, to be dead (that one cop who sort of looks like John Spencer's tenor cousin abets the lie nicely) because he would be if he wasn't wearing one of those Shroud Of Turin ass motherfucking vests that can stop Zeus that dudes wear in movies. And the evil white guys have kidnapped Danny Glover's hot daughter just because they're evil (and stupid; any real drug dealers with CIA/Special Forces connections worth a shit would have just killed his entire family, not to mention they'd have gone for and 10-ringed a headshot on Mel) , so Mel decides to hide in the brush with a scope rifle (a real nice one too; he must have requisitioned it from the LAPD's special Action Movie Armory that they must have considering some of the weaponry movie fuzz gets to use). Here's my favorite part: when it's showtime, Mel manages to kill the bad guys in a manner so badass it has authorial style, leading Gary Busey to go “Damn it, it's Riggs.”

Okay. The idea that you can have a recognizable style in the way you kill dudes is frankly something that pleases me. I find it highly enjoyable. Second, that Riggs (Mel; I know I skip between character and actor names, bear with me, I get excitable) has a style so distinct that even though he's supposed to be fucking dead, Gary Busey recognizes from two gunshots not that it's some random other LAPD sharpshooter, or even Danny Glover's crazy-as-a-shithouse rat other Vietnam buddy (played, hypothetically and with leathery, reptilian swagger by a cynical, wisecracking Lance Fucking Henriksen) who has a flair for long-range hits. No, he recognizes it immediately as Mel. This is why action movies are sacred to me.

And, after all the bad guys are done being killed (including the immortal Al Leong in one of his exasperatingly few speaking roles), we end on a note of familial harmony, Danny inviting Mel in for Christmas dinner with the family, and Mel inviting his dog (with whom he lives in a trailer on the beach for reasons more cinematographic than practical) in, and the dog immediately getting in a fight with the cat. A fight, please note, that perfectly mirrors the initial conflict between Danny Glover and Mel Gibson. And, also note, this coming together prefigures the direction the rest of the series would take, and the ultimate resolution of the fourth movie. But we're not there yet, and we're running a little long, we'll pick things up with a discussion of Lethal Weapon 2 next time!

YOU MADE THE RAIN BLACK

Sir Ridley Scott has won wild praise over the course of his 30+ year career, mainly for a handful of the most visually stunning pictures anyone's ever seen. The bulk of the praise—deservedly—goes to Alien, Blade Runner, and to a lesser extent Gladiator (which has far more detractors than the other two, but don't front, in 2000 Gladiator gave your eyes a hard-on too). Sir Ridley has made his share of shitty movies, to be sure, but everything he's ever done looks really cool, and unlike some hit-or-miss directors, his career isn't divided into “awesome” and “crap.” There are tiers to his career. There are straight-up masterpieces like Alien and Blade Runner. There are pictures like Gladiator that fall just a hair short due to minor foibles (in Gladiator's case, overlength, multiple climaxes, and an extremely polarizing Joaquin Phoenix performance, itself related to another foible, brazen fictionalizing of real-life characters). There are a few other substrata, then there are the shit-tastic complete failures like his Christopher Columbus and Robin Hood movies and G.I. Jane.

At the level just beneath Gladiator, in the “very good but with one or two glaring fuckups” category is the 1989 Michael Douglas cop vehicle Black Rain. There is a lot of very important data to unpack in that description, to wit:

“1989”: Unironic mullets, hideous ties, lots and lots of smoking, and a lot of what now comes off as quaint, primitive culture shock.

“Michael Douglas”: There will be bad hair (it's not quite a mullet, but it's close), mediocre but intense acting, and absolutely every other character in the movie will be told to go fuck themselves at least five times. And, of course, there will be Michael Douglas Face, that unique and wonderful facial expression—captured here in elegantly framed medium closeup—that foretells intense anger and an incipient sloppy attempt to kick ass. Fortunately in Black Rain, the occasionally disturbing psycho-sexual (sexual psycho?) component to Michael Douglas Face (see Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Disclosure) is absent.

“Cop vehicle”: A genre that operated under many hard and fast rules, among which—the hero MUST be divorced, MUST have a drinking problem and at least one other self-destructive habit (in Michael Douglas' case, gambling on himself in outlaw motorcycle races underneath the FDR Drive), he MUST be in trouble with Internal Affairs, and he must be just racist enough that it's not implausible that he get over it by the end of the movie.

Most movies' attitude toward police is stunning when you stop to think about it: the hero is always some wild renegade fuckup, and he's venerated for being under the influence (or at the very least, after effects) of controlled substances at work. Internal Affairs are invariably portrayed as needle-dick killjoy assholes who exist only to keep the “hero” from “doing it his way” to bring the bad guys down. This started, as with the entire cop movie genre, in Dirty Harry, when Four-Eyes tells Clint they have to let the killer go because Clint violated procedure. While you're clearly supposed to sympathize with Clint here, you're also not being told that he's right; procedures are the way they are to protect the innocent, not impede the cops' ability to catch the guilty. Dirty Harry was a 70s movie. The fact that Clint's way was unacceptable to the PD wasn't a sign that the PD was wrong, just an indication of Clint's alienation from it and from civilized society in general. Remember, he throws his badge in the water after he lights up Scorpio at the end. Sequels notwithstanding, Clint's ass was gone off the force at the end of that picture, and he accepted it as reality. That little detail—you know, the fucking climax of the movie—got lost in all the subsequent ripoffs.

All the above being said, and true, Black Rain needn't bear the burden of 80s cop cinema's collective sins. Michael Douglas is not portrayed as a particularly good, or even nice, guy (this is a widely repeated complaint about the movie). Also, he doesn't necessarily get away with everything at the end: even though (I got your fuckin spoiler alert hangin right here) Michael Douglas skates with the Japanese cops at the end, you still get the distinct impression that Internal Affairs will be waiting for him when he gets off the plane in New York, stroking boners and assuring our rule-breaking antihero that there will be no lube.

The final complaint, in re: plotting, is that the story's still a little murky. There's this whole business with this pre-op looking Japanese chick in a sequin dress that lasts most of the movie, but it's never made clear who she is, whose side she's on, and indeed whether or not she committed the murder in the nightclub. This is but a trifle, as eventually it's kind of explained. Sufficiently for this movie, anyway.

Now, on to why Black Rain rules fucking ass: like the rest of Sir Ridley's pictures, Black Rain is stunning visually, and is all the more enjoyable for looking cool for the sake of looking cool. In nearly every single scene, there's steam rising from something or other. There's lots of flashing neon. Dudes bust out swords. Actually . . . fuck, Ridley visually reps his entire career to date in this!

The Duellists—dudes with swords; Michael Douglas has a pissed-off expression on his face the whole picture just like Harvey Keitel.
Alien—Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia are trapped on a long aircraft ride with a monster (Sato).
Blade Runner—steam, neon, Asian people, the odd slow-mo shot for no apparent reason (not employed to as cool effect in Black Rain, alas)
Legend—largely crappy reviews
Someone to Watch Over Me—the first few minutes of Black Rain make Queens look non-shitty. just like in STWOM, proof in itself of Sir Ridley's nonpareil mastery of cinema's visual potential.

Michael Douglas is introduced to the audience, over the first few scenes, as a loner motorcycle enthusiast, adrenaline junkie gambler, divorced dad, friend and partner of slick-dressing sharpster Andy Garcia, and target of an Internal Affairs investigation (and, like he would in Basic Instinct, he has an apartment with a view so awesome that it's no wonder IA's wondering how he's paying the rent). His inability to restrain himself from going off on the IA dudes leads Michael Douglas to join Andy Garcia for a liquid lunch.

Michael Douglas happens to be drinking his lunch at the same restaurant where a bunch of Mafia guys are breaking bread with some Japanese businessmen. Several other Japanese guys enter with machine guns, accompanying a tall, charismatic dude with a nasty growl and a nightmare-inducing stare. This is Sato. He is very bad indeed, and demonstrates this by knifing one of the Japanese guys in the heart, slitting the other's throat, and absconding with a mysterious box the elder Japanese guy had with him.

A shootout and foot chase through the Meatpacking District ensues. Why the Meatpacking District? Because cobblestone streets look cool and there are a lot of manholes for Sir Ridley to shoot steam up through, which also looks cool. Not to mention, when Michael Douglas chases Sato into a meat locker, you can see their breath, and there are all those big swinging pieces of meat. After Andy Garcia comes up with his gun at just the right moment, our heroes bust Sato.

Because at this point in the plot it's necessary to relocate to Japan, the Japanese embassy puts pressure on the State Department, and through the bureaucratic law of fecal gravity, Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia are tasked with bringing Sato back to Japan, where he's done many worse things than knifing a couple dudes in broad daylight. Thinking Sato doesn't speak English, Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia talk freely, revealing their deep bond of friendship, which trumps even Andy Garcia's disapproval of the corruption in which Michael Douglas is ensnared. Sato hears all, and files it away for later.

Sato then turns the table on our protagonists, having some guys from his crew show up at the airport pretending to be cops. Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia, not knowing any better, turn him over. This, naturally, pisses off the real cops, who are about to send their dumb asses back to America before Michael Douglas manages to truculently convince them to stay and aid in the attempt to recapture Sato. The Osaka fuzz assigns Masahiro Masimoto (Takakura Ken), to watchdog them and make sure they behave.

Takakura Ken turns in a massively badass performance as Mas, managing to be a square straight arrow who plays by the rules without being an annoying, sanctimonious dickhead. The way he plays Mas is a constant balancing act: managing to register his horror and disgust at Michael Douglas' boorishness without ever being anything over than crisply polite. Take this exchange, before their formal introduction.

Michael Douglas: Just hope they got a nip in this building who speaks fuckin' English.
Mas (turning to Michael Douglas, introducing himself): Assistant Inspector Matsumoto Masahiro, Osaka Prefecture Police. (pause) And I do speak fuckin' English.

The way he delivers the line is what puts it over. His inflection is flat, with just the slightest bit of edge to the last part. And it proves a point that all cultures built on restraint (like Sir Ridley's native England as well as Japan) have known since the dawn of time: you can own the shit out of somebody much more effectively through cold, crisp politeness than you can by roaring, waving your fucking tentacles, and stuffing virgins into your mouth like an American.

In fairly short order, Michael Douglas starts finding clues that lead him to believe that there's some kind of counterfeiting conspiracy going on and, inevitably, running afoul of the Osaka cops, who consider him—not without reason—to be a borderline subhuman boor. He also encounters a blonde nightclub owner and possible madam, played by Kate Capshaw, perhaps the movie's most massive handicap.

I'm sure she's a lovely person—Steven Spielberg certainly thinks so—but man, every scene she's in in this grinds to a halt. Her line readings are really weird; there's always like a second's pause before she speaks, and her inflections are all stylized like she's trying so hard to be Barbra Stanwyck her head's about to explode. Oddly enough, Sharon Stone—herself no slouch in the shitty acting department—could have played this role in her sleep, even though she was a touch too young when Black Rain came out, and she also wasn't famous at that point because Paul Verhoeven had yet to work his Dutch fetishist's magic on her. There were any number of blondes (her being a blonde is semiotically important, this being Japan after all) who could have played this role and not sucked, but hey, such is life. Sometimes roles get miscast, not the end of the universe.

Especially not with the fairly intriguing plot about Yakuza intrigue and East-West culture clash unfolding. Michael Douglas clashes with Mas over what Mas thinks is Michael Douglas living down to his rep and stealing some money from a crime scene, only what Michael Douglas is actually doing is proving that it's counterfeit by the way it burns. He gets off the hook by demonstrating to Mas' boss Ohashi (who's awesome in this, and who led me one time when very drunk to willfully misspell his name as O'Hashi and make a tortured joke about the omnipresence of Irish police, even in the East; I guess you had to have been there).

Andy Garcia tries to reconcile with Mas, who was, after all, acting in good faith and on prior knowledge of Michael Douglas' corruption troubles. Michael Douglas is having none of this, so while Andy Garcia and Mas get shitfaced and hop up on stage to sing a Ray Charles song, Michael Douglas has a talk with Kate Capshaw about Sato's war with a Yakuza Godfather named Sugai.

Walking home drunk, Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia encounter a lone motorcyclist (motorcycles keep popping up all over this picture as a signifier of lawlessness, making Michael Douglas' ultimate takedown of Sato after a motorcycle chase an affirmation of the belief that in order to catch the criminal, a cop must be part criminal himself—see Thomas Harris' Red Dragon). Andy Garcia holds up his overcoat for the motorcyclist to try to catch (as he does in his first scene with Michael Douglas at the beginning of the movie, where he snatches it away at the last second). Because he's so drunk he was just singing Ray Charles songs at a Japanese nightclub, Andy Garcia's reflexes are slow and the guy catches it. Instead of giving it back, he lures Andy Garcia into a trap where Sato ultimately cuts his fucking head off with a wazikashi (another clever bit of symbolism, cutting off Michael Douglas' partner's head with the traditional “companion” sword to the katana).

Michael Douglas is devastated, and expresses this in the acceptable masculine fashion, staring off into middle distance on a rainy night. Somehow, Kate Capshaw randomly knows exactly where he's going to be (remember, this is before cell phones, he couldn't just text her saying meet me at the Bridge of Existential Contemplation), and takes him back to her place. Less implausibly—he is, after all, a cop—Mas finds Michael Douglas there and, under the pretense of it being a tradition, lets Michael Douglas have Andy Garcia's gun so he can go renegade and kick some ass.

Michael Douglas and Mas bond while staking out the ladyboi in the sequined dress. After a tensely filmed pursuit sequence, one of Sato's dudes leads Michael Douglas and Mas to a big intimidating-looking steel mill. (Why a steel mill? Because it looks cool, shut up). There they witness a meeting between Sato and Sugai where Sato lays out his terms for truce: he wants territory of his own, and to be recognized as an equal by the other Yakuza Godfathers. Sugai, in turn, insists that Sato atone for his American-style fuckery, but the summit is interrupted when Michael Douglas accidentally lets his presence be known (fuckin' Americans, can't take the fucktards anywhere) and Sato's dudes fan out for a round of “Let's mindfuck the gaijin,” the most popular game show in Japan.

At this point, we must acknowledge one of the coolest things in Black Rain—the voice casting of the Japanese actors. They all look perfect too, but holy mother of linguistic God these fucking guys sound cool speaking Japanese. They all sound like Tom Waits chainsmoking and reading the Hagakure into a mic with the sound mixer dropping out whatever treble is left. The rises and dips in volume are like music. Even if all they're saying is “Wow Michael Douglas is an asshole” or “Pass the salt,” it sure sounds cool, proving that not knowing what someone's saying is one of the most important elements in finding it interesting.

The hijinks at the steel mill end up pissing Ohashi off to the point where he deports Michael Douglas and suspends Mas. Michael Douglas manages to very cleverly make his way off the plane and—despite not being able to read the Osaka phone book—over to Mas' house, where he tries to convince Mas to storm the castle and kill everybody with him. Mas tries to explain concepts like honor and shame to Michael Douglas, but the movie's way too short for a task that massive, so Michael Douglas goes and tracks down Sugai with almost suicidal brazenness. Showing great character growth, Michael Douglas manages some humility in this scene—even if it is an act to achieve a goal, even thinking to play it that way took some actual humility—and convinces Sugai let him take out Sato, since as an outsider he's got nothing to do with Yakuza politics.

From there, it's down to the requisite action climax, which has several outstanding and wonderfully surprising elements. No, I'm not talking about the painfully predictable Matsumoto ex machina moment where Mas shows up and kills the guy right when he's about to kill Michael Douglas and quotes back a retarded, vague Michael Douglas line from earlier. I'm talking primarily about these two guys:

Al Leong

Back in the late 80s, if you wanted to be a cool movie, it was absolutely mandatory that you have Al Leong. Behold this partial CV: Big Trouble in Little China, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, They Live, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Death Warrant, Rapid Fire. In every single one of those fine, fine motion pictures except one, Al Leong showed up, was a badass of gargantuan proportions, flashed that magnificent facial hair and those terrific martial arts skills, and then he got his motherfuckin ass killed by the good guy. The only thing I've ever seen Al Leong in where he doesn't get his motherfuckin ass killed by the good guy is Bill & Ted, and that's because people don't get killed in Bill & Ted. Al was probably really out of sorts on that set: “Hey, when do I get killed?” “You don't get killed in this picture.” “Wait, what? There are movies where I don't get killed? [Ed. Note: Al even, stunningly, played the good guy in a little-seen 1989 movie called Cage.] Fuck, call my agent, there's been a mistake.”

But there's more than just Al Leong. Oh yes. Behold:

Professor Toru Tanaka

The Professor was one of a very select few—maybe the only non-extra—to ever be killed by both Chuck Norris and Arnold. While the Professor's cinematic career was less consistently glorious than Al Leong's (there was surprisingly little overlap between their careers, considering that it seemed like they were both in every action movie in the 80s; their only collaborations other than Black Rain were episodes of The A-Team and The Fall Guy, two big favorites of my youth, as well as fucktard scripture The Last Action Hero, and the hideously stupid and boring Jeff Speakman vehicle The Perfect Weapon) you always knew that even if the movie sucked, the Professor's scene(s) could be relied on for a soupcon of awesomeness. Getting his start as a wrestling “heel” (read: bad guy), the Professor went on to be the big guy in every shitass action movie where the hero gulps and goes “oh fuck I'm gonna have a job beating this guy.” Black Rain didn't see the full realization of the Professor's ass-kicking potential (he saved his best for Arnold and Chuck), but make no mistake: Black Rain fucking has Al Leong and the fucking Professor. In the same movie. That's a fistful of style points right there.


As is often the case in the collective Leong/Tanaka oeuvre, they are both killed quickly and messily, and the focus remains on Michael Douglas pursuing Sato, who has, without his creepy stare wavering from Sugai's face for one second, cut off his own pinkie in the infamous Yakuza tradition (I always wondered, if some Yakuza guy starts shit with you, and you see he's short a few fingers, you have to figure he's a total fuckup, right? Not that you'd want to fight even a fuckup Yakuza, but still). Michael Douglas, in the motorcycle chase mentioned earlier, tears ass after Sato through the Japanese countryside.

Because it wasn't enough for the climax to have the subtle signifier of the motorcycle representing the necessity of the cop embracing the outlaw within, the two of them roll around in the mud beating the shit out of each other, making what's usually a metaphor literal. In a sign of personal growth, once Michael Douglas wins, Sato gives him this look like, “Yeah, go ahead motherfucker, impale me on that sharp piece of wood” and Michael Douglas says, “Nuh uh, bitch, me and Mas are going to arrest you.”

The scene when Michael Douglas and Mas perp-walk Sato into Osaka PD headquarters is kind of awesome, because all the Japanese guys in suits' jaws hit the floor to see these two dirty-ass motherfuckers toss the most wanted psycho in the country around like “And what, bitch?” Even Ohashi is like “Hey . . . procedure shmocedure, nice job boys.” And then there's the sentimental ending and that shockingly good Gregg Allman song (don't fuckin look at me, I'm just as surprised as you are).

Ultimately, Black Rain would be just another 80s cop movie, albeit a stylishly filmed one, but for two things. Sure, there's a lot that's cool in this movie: the camerawork, the sound, the murderer's row of awesome character actors (Luis Guzman and John Spencer feature in the NYC bits), all of which outweigh Kate Capshaw's terrible performance and all the cop movie cliches. But the two things that really put Black Rain over the top are Takakura Ken as Mas (who we've already covered), and even more than that, Yusaku Matsuda as Sato. And yes, he's cool enough to have his own action figure.

Sato is, quite simply, number two behind Hans Gruber in the 80s villain pantheon. Yes. He's that fucking good. Matsuda doesn't do a whole lot as Sato, but he doesn't have to. All he has is that oddly terrifying haircut, that slightly shitty posture that makes him look even crazier, and those EYES. There is no ambiguity whatsoever when Sato is pissed at you. His eyes get really big. His lip snarls. Then you're basically fucking dead.

What's scariest about Sato is that he's so insecure. He has a child's need to be the center of attention, and a grown-ass man's ability to kill everything in sight if he doesn't get it. He desperately wants the recognition of the other Yakuza, but is unsure enough that they'll grant it that he just decides to kill all of them. Motherfucker is dangerous, man.

Tragically, Matsuda died of cancer less than two months after Black Rain's release, which would have surely made him an international star. His legacy lives on, as the inspiration for the protagonist in the game Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny, and the model for the protagonist of anime series Cowboy Bebop.

And so there you have it. Black Rain. Look past the Douglas. See the awesome.