Rising Sun

When Michael Crichton wrote his best-selling thriller Rising Sun, he wrote the character of hero John Connor with Sean Connery in mind. For Philip Kaufman's film version of the novel, Sean Connery, needless to say, fits seamlessly into the role of a legendary police detective who is an expert in ...more

Philip Kaufman's adaptation of Michael Crichton's Japan-bashing potboiler is a fairly standard buddy-cop movie featuring a pair of entertaining star performances. Although the novel's overblown alarmism about the dangers of a dominant Japan would soon be undercut by the meltdown of its economy, the director shrewdly muted the xenophobic material that had made the book so controversial, transforming it into a noirishly incomprehensible film, whose byzantine plot, proliferating characters, and ...more