Rising Sun (1993)

Michael Crichton's Rising Sun is an extensive, dense, unpredictable mess. The actors have a lot of fun and the story is a splurge of entertainment, but it's not paying enough attention to a couple of things. One of them is what its focus is. Is the film about the murder, the two men solving the murder, the clash of American and Japanese cultures, or what? The other thing the film forgets could be a drawback of the first thing. It's that it doesn't tie up all its loose ends. At the end, there are strands left with no ending, even a mysterious ambiguous one. It just ends because it feels the pace of the film requires it to fade out at that particular point.

The film is not bad, mostly because it's far from boring. In fact, there are many scenes of dialogue, despite a few corny scenes of dialogue, that are subtly interesting. We don't quite understand why the exchanges are interesting until later, when we realize that the characters are so deeply contemplated that the scene felt as real as the room you're sitting in. But maybe I'm giving the film too much credit for simply being a load of fun for Michael Crichton to write. After all, he wrote and directed one of the greatest heist films ever made, The Great Train Robbery, also with Sean Connery.

Sean Connery, of course, is the highlight of the film, because there's hardly a way he cannot be. Despite his irrepressible suavity, he does not play himself. He plays a resentful, inflexible, self-indulgent veteran cop, and we are supposed to like Wesley Snipes more because the film centers, well, seems to want to center around his character and also we're given more backstory and information on him. However, we don't like Snipes more than him. Connery may play a stubborn old jerk, but I'd rather one of those than a pompous, intolerant, overpround young jerk like Snipes can hardly help but play.

I cannot reach a verdict on this film. How can I? There are so many things to enjoy at the same time they are hazardous to the film's health.