But the movie's best performance comes from Yusaku Natsuda, who portrays an upstart crime boss named Sato. Like Douglas, Natsuda gets little help from the screenwriters. Nonetheless, he creates one wicked character in Sato. Anyone who sees the film won't forget Natsuda's grisly digital sacrifice in the next-to-last scene.

If you want to look at either Michael Douglas or Tokyo for two hours, go see Black Rain. On the other hand, if you're seeking the next chapter in the creative evolution of Ridley Scott, you may be disappointed.

The movie's title suggests that its makers aspired to more than a good cop movie. The title comes from an exchange between Douglas and Tomisaburo Wakayama, who plays the mobster Sugai. When Douglas criticizes the mafioso's livelihood, Wakayama launches into a monologue on the horror of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

"The heat brought rain," he tells Douglas. "The rain was black. You made the rain black."

Though "black rain" actually fits nicely with Scott's dark vision of Tokyo, the exchange between Douglas and Wakayama comes out of nowhere. Perhaps we're supposed to sense the atom bomb beneath the frenetic violence of the rest of the movie. Perhaps Americans are to blame for the nasty pass things have come to in the Tokyo underworld. The point's not clear.

Forty years after Hiroshima, Black Rain seems more trivial than anything else.