Rising Sun (1993)

"You should know, I'm a black belt.", 29 November 2017

Rising Sun is basically a buddy-cop movie paring the unlikely duo of Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes. In the movie, both are cops who have a working relationship with the local Asian-American community. So, when a murder occurs during a party at the Nakamoto Company's American headquarters, they are called in to help with the investigation.

First, I'm not going to go into detail on the racial / racist aspects of the film that you can read about in other posts. I'll just limit my comments to this – making the baddies in this movie Japanese does not automatically make it a racist film. I've read a number of comments that seem to indicate that if you make a group (whether it's Asian, African-American, Jewish, or whatever) the bad guys, then you're a racist. If you believe in this argument, then I suppose the only safe group that can play the bad guys are white dudes. Just like good guys, bad guys should and do come from every imaginable race or ethnic group. I suppose the filmmakers could have done a better job of presenting more Asians in a positive light, but the movie was already bloated enough without cowing to PC drivel.

Anyway, as for Rising Sun, overall I'm going to call it about average. The film has a few nice action sequences, enjoyable performances from Connery and Snipes, and a plot with enough twists and turns (even though the real killer's identity is as obvious as the hand in front of your face) to keep me reasonably interested throughout. I guess my favorite bits were (1) the way Tia Carerra uncovered the altered video (interesting) and (2) watching Snipes use his marital arts skills near the end of the film (awesome). Also, similar to his Bond film, You Only Live Twice, I got a real kick out of Connery's alleged expertise in all things Japanese. That may be the most racist part of the film, but Connery is so hysterical I can't help but be entertained (Note: I'm laughing at Connery – not Japanese customs or people).

As for what didn't work for me, like the last film I wrote about, Rising Sun is horribly bloated. At over two hours in length, it overstays its welcome by about 30 minutes. There are so many things that could have been cut without really affecting the final film. Why is Steve Busciei even in the movie? Cut his scenes and save a few minutes there. Why do we need more than one scene explaining how to bow? Cut out the others and you've saved several more minutes. Why is so much time spent with Connery and Snipes jibber-jabbering about nothing? Cut some of that out and save even more minutes. There are dozens of other examples I could cite where, with judicious editing, the movie could have been trimmed to a lean 90 minutes.

In the end, this is another of those cases where the good and the bad pretty much balance out. I'm left with rating Rising Sun a 5/10.

5/10