RISING SUN (1993) Way, way worse than I remember it This movie sits waaaaaaaay off to the side of movies I normally review, but catching the latter half on TV several weeks ago piqued my desire to write one - for all the wrong reasons. I saw this in the theatre, and remember rather liking it. Seeing it on TV more recently, it was like watching a big, stinky block of cheese harden in the sun. I couldn't believe the dialogue I was hearing, but I believed all too well the grimaces of the actors who had to say it. I remember liking this movie the first time I saw it - I can't think of another movie that took such a dive in a second viewing. Based on the mildly controversial book by Michael Crichton (haven't read it), Rising Sun stars Wesley Snipes and Sean Connery as LAPD detectives investigating the murder of a young woman during the grand opening of a Japanese-made office tower (the company logo looks like a swastika!). Connery is familiar with Japanese customs, Snipes is not. Together, they uncover a big conspiracy. (well, not that big) Now, the overall plot structure of Rising Sun is mostly just fine, probably more or less intact from the source novel, though it is a little awkward in the middle section...the movie starts, proceeds, and then suddenly jumps forward four days so the interim can be presented in flashback. Then, it wraps up. I've seen more awkward structures. It's the dialogue and characters which suck, suck, FUCKING suck. I couldn't tell you offhand what the worst-written movie I've ever seen was, but if I had to make a list, Rising Sun would be the first one on it. Blame for this script goes to Crichton, director Philip Kaufman, and Michael Backes, with his only writing credit ever. Firstoff is the character "design". These are characters who we know are smart and competent, not because we observe them talking intelligently and doing their jobs competently, but because they (or somebody else) makes the point to verbalize these things. "I'm a good cop!" says Snipes in one scene, saving the voiceover-guy the trouble of saying "He's a good cop!" in the trailer. One character, played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, is named Eddie, and a girl who knows him says "They don't call him Crazy Eddie for nothing." At no other point in the film do I recall him being called Crazy Eddie. For that matter, he doesn't do anything crazy, so if somebody did call him that...it'd be for nothing! It gets worse when these descriptions of the characters start stumbling over themselves. When Snipes and a video technologist played by Tia Carrere dissect a doctored surveillance video disc from the crime scene, Snipes says "If only we had the original disc, we could see what happened after that time." Now, this is a statement of such thudding obviousness, it blows my mind that it was included in the script at all. I mean...duh! But then, THEN, Carrere says, with perfect sincerity, "Exactly. You catch on fast, Lieutenant Smith." His first name is Web. So he says, with just as much sincerity, and indeed a little puffery, "Web. And yeah, I do." Other embarrassments are Stan Shaw as a security guard who keeps twitching and wringing his hands and saying "You'll never beat them. They're too good." Kevin Anderson is a white guy (worst hair in this or any movie) working for the Japanese team who at one point tells Snipes to quit loafing and get his car, resulting in the fairly witless comeback "Wrong guy, wrong fucking century!" Steve Buscemi, who usually livens up terrible movies like this, is as laughable as anyone else here, playing a reporter nicknamed "The Weasel", gee, I wonder if we're supposed to like this guy or not. Harvey Keitel is here as an unrepentant xenophobe who leers and squints his way through the whole movie, one of the worst performances of his I've seen. When he sees some evidence on that video disc, he leaps up, thrusts out a finger and cries out "THERE!" Then he goes on a rant about how much he's gonna love breaking the suspect's arms. Most embarrassing, however, has to be Sean Connery. I've read that when writing this book, Crichton wrote this role with Connery in mind. Again, I haven't read the book. But Connery is basically playing a man who spent enough time in Japan to soak up a lot of Japanese culture...which is basically put to use with constant "Look at how cool I am!"-isms. I expect this kind of shit from Jack Nicholson. When The Weasel says "Hey!", he replies, "Hay? Hay is for horses." Even the coolest guy in the world can't come across as cool saying something like that. Another gem: "I don't think I should say any more...because I just realized they may have bugged your car." Worst Connery performance ever, made that much worse by the simple fact that Connery is supposed to be one of those actors who's fun to watch even when he's performing shit. In the whole damn movie, only Tagawa as the young playboy and Mako as the corporate patriarch come across with any dignity at all. While the plot structure is okay, there are problems in the details, like how during one police raid, three cops stand around covering a naked woman, who has surrendered and is lying on the ground, but nobody goes to help the guy with a psycho naked woman jumping on his back and pounding on him. And the faked image on the video disc shouldn't have taken any amount of high-tech whiz-banging to figure out - you can clearly see one character's smaller, darker, Asian face placed on another guy's bigger, whiter, Caucasian scalp, with a fairly distinct line separating the cut-and-paste job. A chase scene that leads through a poor neighborhood in which Snipes is known is a little gratuitous, but not worth complaining about on its own; no, it's the shamelessly patronizing solution to it, when Snipes says that bad neighborhoods may be America's last advantage. Uh, really? Advantage over what? For that matter, this is Snipes' biggest contribution to the plot, when he convinces the boyz n' tha hood to delay the pursuing car. That's it, whole movie, that's all he does. Except for the scene where he faxes proof of his knowledge of wrongdoing to a shady character, causing that character to kill himself in about two minutes. Good job, Kojak. Crichton himself made very clear that this movie is far removed from anything he intended with the book, and doesn't like being associated with it. I don't blame him, though he's never had much of a gift for writing dialogue, and I do wonder how much of the dialogue here was lifted from the book. One thing in particular he was displeased with was that they took his protagonist, made him black, and gave him a lot of "black" dialogue and situations, like going back to his old neighborhood where he's respected not because he's a competent policeman who doesn't beat the crap out of his suspects, but because he was once a basketball champ. "Hay is for horses." It just doesn't get worse than that. Indeed, Rising Sun is the dumbest movie I've ever seen that had otherwise intelligent people working on it. Seemed like a passable enough movie in 1993, garnering mixed reviews, and I know I thought it wasn't half-bad at the time. Seeing it again, I know better. BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE