Black Rain (1989, Ridley Scott)

Black Rain features one of the worst action movie fight scenes. It’s unnecessary—they could’ve just worked around it since participants Michael Douglas and Matsuda Yûsaku are bad at it, the fight choreography is terrible, and it manages to be the most embarrassing thing director Scott oversees in the film and Black Rain’s chock full of laughable acting, worse writing, and lots of racism.

But that fight scene.

Yikes.

The film—which, two-thirds of the way through, I realized—was supposed to be a Beverly Hills Cop sequel. But instead of Eddie Murphy cracking wise as he and Judge Reinhold travel through Osaka—Osaka City Cop?—it’s Douglas and Andy Garcia. They went out for a totally normal New York cop lunch—Douglas had just gotten railroaded by the “suits” in Internal Affairs (remember when media tried to convince the world Internal Affairs was more than enough), so he and Garcia have a drinking lunch. Now, Douglas is a tough guy cop. Garcia is the dapper, charming one. Garcia’s a lot of fun in Black Rain. He’s the only one who thinks it might be able to lead to something.

I mean, I’m sure Douglas thought he had a future as “the thinking man’s Stallone,” but he very much did not, and Rain shows why. Douglas has one-liners at the end of every scene. And he’s a dirty cop. Black Rain is about how we should like dirty cops. They’re the real heroes if you think about it. The dirty cop stuff should be the wildest the movie gets—but the racism is where it’s at. Multiple times in Black Rain, the movie pauses for Douglas to try to think of something racist to say, but then the script can’t think of anything, so he stammers out something silly. Then the nearest Japanese character has to acknowledge what Douglas said, agree with it, apologize for it, and prostrate themselves so Douglas can get in the shitty one-liner.

The film’s script, from Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis, is garbage. Not just because it’s bad, racist, and fascist but because it doesn’t have a story. See, at their drinking lunch, Douglas and Garcia see eighties manga caricature Matsuda kill some guys. So they give chase—they’re hero cops, after all; the entire movie is about how they’re running to the next action scene. It’s silly but also might work with Murphy and Reinhold. They catch Matsuda and have to take him back to Japan. The exchange goes wrong, and Douglas and Garcia stay to show the stupid Japanese cops how it’s done.

At its best, Black Rain’s a good-looking vanity cologne commercial for Douglas. Jan de Bont and Howard Atherton’s photography is peerless. Rain’s gorgeous, even when it’s trying to say the Japanese are super-polluted and not chill like New York City. It’s one heck of a flex given Rain is one of those “let’s shoot New York like L.A.,” so Douglas is motorcycling around the city, often chewing gum.

Douglas is terrible. I mean, his heart’s in some of it. He delivers the racism from the diaphragm, but he’s utterly charmless. Garcia’s okay. Fun, likable. Okay. Takakura Ken is their Japanese cop sidekick. After being the brunt of Douglas’s jokes, he eventually becomes part of the gang, after prostrating himself to white savior Douglas.

Kate Capshaw’s the “love interest.” It’s a nothing role; she’s there to translate for Douglas and get him takeout, but Capshaw’s working way harder than the part deserves. You see her run out of script and direction and just wing it to try to find some meat.

Lousy music from Hans Zimmer. The Gregg Allman original song is terrible, though I do wish it were subtitled Michael Douglas’s Theme.

Good production design from Norris Spencer, who basically makes Osaka look as much like Blade Runner as he can. It’s a bad, unpleasant movie–I forgot, John Spencer’s bad in it, which is enough reason it should be avoided; John Spencer FTW—but the photography’s singular. Maybe it’s better muted.

It’s definitely better muted.

Dreamscape (1984, Joseph Ruben)

Dreamscape has a lot of subplots. The main plot barely gets any more time during the second act than the subplots. But I’m getting ahead of myself because I wanted to talk about the first act, which has Dennis Quaid getting reacquainted with mentor Max von Sydow. The film opens with this fast, fun action sequence with psychic Quaid winning big at the track and having to outsmart some goons. It perfectly utilizes Quaid’s charm and director Ruben has a fantastic pace. Richard Halsey’s editing on Dreamscape is strong, he just doesn’t get a lot of opportunities to excel after the open.

Then von Sydow gets Quaid to do the dream experiments–going into other people’s dreams, which he needs to train to do and it does give the film a natural structure for a while but there’s all those subplots. Time to talk about the subplots. There’s Christopher Plummer’s government guy who wants them to dream fix the President (an exhausted Eddie Albert). There’s Quaid’s rivalry with David Patrick Kelly’s fellow dream psychic. There’s Quaid’s romance of Kate Capshaw. There’s Quaid’s friendship with young nightmare sufferer, Cory ‘Bumper’ Yothers (yes, he’s Tina’s big brother). Finally, there’s Quaid and George Wendt, who’s investigating the whole project. von Sydow and Quaid actually do have something approaching character development in their scenes, which I’ll lump into the main plot.

The script–from original story writer David Loughery, Chuck Russell, and director Ruben–lacks any connective tissue between the subplots. It’s like they each took a few, wrote them, then lined up the scenes. Even though it’s an exceptionally limited setting–a college campus where shadowy government stuff goes on and there are barely any students–these characters have no relationships with anyone outside the person they’re opposite. Capshaw and von Sydow, for example, have absolutely no relationship outside of exposition and direction, even though they’ve been working together for years. Same goes for Kelly and Capshaw. And Kelly and von Sydow. And Capshaw and Plummer. And everyone and Wendt. It’s very strange and very poorly done. The writing is often fine–Plummer’s got a lot of scenery to chew, Kelly’s part is awesome, von Sydow’s fantastic–but it doesn’t have a narrative flow. It’s almost like Dreamscape was made to be watched with commercial breaks.

Quaid’s solid in the lead. He doesn’t get much to do–his romance with Capshaw, while ostensibly steamy, isn’t enough–and he’s just a passenger in the rest of his subplots. He and von Sydow are great together, however. As well as Quaid and Kelly. They’re great nemeses. Capshaw’s not terrible. She’s not good, but she’s not terrible. She gets a weak part and can’t do anything with it; Dreamscape is a movie where the actors need to be able to do something with their weak parts. As scripted, Plummer’s barely two dimensional, yet Plummer is able to at least make the part into something. Capshaw can’t. Partially her fault, mostly the script’s fault, partially Ruben’s fault.

And Maurice Jarre doesn’t help anyone with his music. He makes Dreamscape weirder in a way completely contrary to what Ruben’s doing.

There are some great special effects and some solid sequences, but the third act’s a mess and the denouement is somewhat worse.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984, Steven Spielberg)

I can understand Chinese people being upset with the stereotypes–Spielberg and company basically lift all the anti-Japanese stereotypes from early 1940s American films and apply them to the Chinese–but at least they’re only goofy and mischievous. The Indians in the film are downright evil. Temple of Doom‘s atrocious script (I suppose Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz do manage to get a few excellent one-liners in) never explains how the bad guys came to have their titular temple, but it certainly implies, left to their own devices, the Indian upper class is inclined toward evil. The good Indians, working for the British (of course), show up at the end for a moment.

Besides the film’s amazingly Western view of the world (it takes the worst from old serials instead of the best… or even the mediocre and not just in its portrayal of non-whites, there’s a moment where the bad guy goes through the secret hatch to escape), it is, simply put, a piece of crap. There are some good action sequences–remove the story from the last act and all the action stuff is well choreographed and, in another context, exciting–but the rest is garbage. Oh, the dinner scene. I forgot–Indians are barbaric savages who eat gross food too. Spielberg, Lucas, Huyck and Katz really take the low road here (but it seems like most of Spielberg and Lucas’s mid 1980s output often did).

While there are some real Spielberg touches–the annoying kids, the poor casting of Kate Capshaw, who gives one of the worst performances I can remember–but it all feels like too much Lucas. Lucas came up with the shallow story, but a lot of the sequences from Temple of Doom seem like they’re straight from Return of the Jedi. Maybe ILM had all the photography techniques down.

Harrison Ford escapes somewhat unscathed. Even he can’t make the scenes with Capshaw believable, but the scenes with the annoying kid are fine. The problem, again, comes from the script. Huyck and Katz turn Indiana Jones into a superhero. An occasionally lucky one, but a superhero nonetheless and it isn’t particularly interesting watching him in the action montages. The full scenes, where he escapes due to environment or the bad guy’s bad luck, those are fine. But when it’s Indiana Jones knocking people out with one punch… it all seems too goofy. The story never gives the impression he’s smart, which is a bit of a problem. It comes kind of close a few times, but it’s a shock every time someone refers to him as “Dr. Jones.”

Spielberg always said he made the third Indiana Jones to make up for Temple of Doom. Well, if he was so aware it was something he needed to atone for, why’d he make it in the first place?