Review of Black Rain (1989) by Emeka W — 19 Jun 2008

One of my friends thinks that Sato is one of the scariest-looking villains in the history of film. The key word is "looking.".

Ridley Scott has always been a shallow director - pretty pictures come way before pesky nuisances like plot, character development, thematic depth, and logic. And his best movies play to that strength: The scripts don't require complex characters, leaving Scott free to make the movie look as badass as possible, without having to worry about pesky nuisances like "psychology" and "motivation.".

Look at "Black Rain": it follows the incredibly shallow '80s-cop-movie formula to the letter ("loose cannon cop with nothing to loose," "level-headed partner," "the new guy that follows the rules at first, but starts breaking them when he figures out that procedure doesn't yield results," etc.), but Scott realizes it and doesn't try fighting the formula because he knows that (A) he can't and (B) doesn't need to. After all, we don't go to cop movies for originality or well-developed characters; we go for badass heroes, quotable one-liners and cool looking explosions. Surface stuff.

And that's exactly what Ridley Scott gives us - surface stuff. That villain? No, he isn't developed beyond the "I'm a bad guy" stage, but he looks so damn creepy that it doesn't matter.