Rising Sun

Based on the (far, far superior) novel by Michael Crichton, Rising Sun follows Wesley Snipes’ Webster Smith as he and disgraced police officer John Connor (Sean Connery) reluctantly team up to solve the murder of a young woman (Tatjana Patitz’s Cheryl Lynn) found dead at a Japanese corporation’s American headquarters. It’s clear immediately that Rising Sun has been infused with few attributes designed to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest, as filmmaker Philip Kaufman, working from a script cowritten with Crichton and Michael Backes, delivers a disjointed and thoroughly tedious narrative that generally proceeds at a lumbering, excessively deliberate pace – with the continuing emphasis on Smith and Connor’s impossibly dull investigation perpetuating the movie’s far-from-entertaining atmosphere. There’s ultimately nothing here that works in the slightest; Snipes and Connery possess zero chemistry together, the central case couldn’t possibly be less compelling, and Kaufman proves unable to offer up even a hint of momentum, with the proliferation of such negative elements (and many more) certainly ensuring that large swaths of Rising Sun are about as captivating and engrossing as an infomercial. Kaufman’s less-than-artful efforts at peppering the story with instances of social commentary fall hopelessly flat as well, and there’s little doubt that the picture’s climactic stretch, which is rife with surprise revelations and twists, is hardly able to compensate for the uselessness of everything preceding it – with the end result a truly disastrous adaptation that couldn’t possibly be any worse. (This is certainly as bad as it gets in terms of Crichton books translated to the big screen, which is in itself no small feat given the existence of Congo and Timeline.)

1/2* out of ****