Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Jans De Bont makes this film, it's pretty as hell visually. Ridley Scott shows his directorial chops, Douglas delivers as the vengeful cop with a chip on his shoulder. Great support from Garcia, Capshaw, Spencer and Takakura. Yasaku Matsuda plays a great villain, a tragic story that he was suffering from terminal cancer during filming. Hans Zimmer provides a great score and soundtrack. One of the truly underrated cop films of the 90's, I still love watching this movie.

l'd watched this picture for first time in 1993 on television since then more twice but now on DVD on widescreen format and classic dubbed version. The movie remember Robert Mitchum's Yakuza and Ridley Scoth has a visual approach of Blade Runner in many scenes...and Michael Douglas as a corrupt cop in a mission in Japan to delivery mob's gangster who escape of this hands for a false Japanese police which arrive early at airport...so he has to prove that wasn't intentional escape and they accept but as observer until your friend and cop Andy Garcia be killed by the mob's boss...even has been suspicious of your past by local police Douglas have a new partner and together trying to arrest the gangster who now have a half of plate to make fake dollars...great Scoth's picture on action and great surprise in the end!!!

I'm going to start by saying I'm one of the many people who did not particularly enjoy this movie. Id expect a lot of the clichés and so forth from a cop action/thriller film, but I really didn't expect it from from a director like Ridley. That said, I don't blame Ridley, he did the best he could with a weak script. And in fairness to him, the visuals and soundtrack are the only things that stop this from being a completely forgettable. The soundtrack alone is particularly good.I'm not going to write a synopsis, it's already been done by hundreds of other reviewers, and frankly it isn't worth another attempt. Save to say, it's a fish out of water cop film, starring hard nosed cop, streetwise girl, rookie partner and an evil gangster. Basically take any other cop film you have seen and change the setting to Japan. I noticed another review touting this as the "thinking mans cop film", which I found quite amusing as the storyline isn't exactly homers odyssey in terms of complexity. The acting is, at best, passable, but nothing overly attention grabbing. I'm not a great fan of Douglas, I find his acting a little contrived at the best of times, but his is probably the strongest performance, which isn't really saying a lot as his character is thoroughly unlikeable and you can't help but savour every bad thing that happens to him. The Japanese cast appear to be there purely for decorative purposes, and to enforce various stereotypes and tired clichés. The saddest thing about this film is the potential it had, and in the presence of a script that wasn't totally worn out and lacking in plausibility, it could have been something quite spectacular, instead of an aesthetically pleasing waste of time.

Well, the opening gets way too long, and in my opinion, doesn't really detail anything except to connect at the finale action sequence. That, in my opinion is kind of stupid because it waste enough minutes to have a not so significant connection. The story gets so very predictable, just like a typical Steven Segal or Van Damme movie where he would go into a place outside the US and wreak havoc and beat the living hell out of the sorry people there. Having a very predictable plot, it gets even more stupid by presenting it just over two hours long. The scenes take too long while most viewers would have guessed where they would lead to after the first 2 or three minutes into them anyways. Michael Douglas tried to act as the tough guy cop, but in my opinion, he should stick to dramas, or at most thrillers, and stay away from action movie.