Pretentious movie

Connor's love of the Japanese was ridiculous and led him to truly ridiculous thinking like saying the criminals expect to be caught in Japan because convictions run 90%. That doesn't prove the criminals are being caught and convicted. It was revealed that Japanese police only investigate crimes they think they can solve. If they find a dead hooker in an alley witt her throat slit they'll write it up as a suicide or accidental death. I read of one case where a dead sumo wrestler was beaten savagely and burnt with cigarettes and they called it accidental death, I think. Hence their high "suicide" rate. It's easy to say you have low crime and low unsolved murders and high convictions. Much harder to prove the right people were caught and not just "rounding up the usual suspects." And were crimes labeled accurately or for the convenience and honor of police and politicians?

Criminals in Japan are not afraid of being caught. The Yakuza crime bosses openly done with politicians and are celebrities and public heroes. One of them came to the USA and got a liver transplant with the help of our FBI, cutting ahead of others on the waiting list. And how many dead bodies are hidden in the concrete of some Japanese skyscraper and written up as missing people instead of homicide victims? Connor is a joke.

Another dumb thing was how they edited the video. It would have been MUCH easier to just cut the clock out of the frame and paste it over footage of the empty room. Instead they stupidly have some guy walk through the room taking pictures right in front of the police and take hours digitally painting Eddie out of the picture. And the senator had curly brown hair - not straight black hair like Eddie. The dumbest detective would notice that. There was no way Eddie could have been the killer based on the doctored and incomplete video the police were first given. They could have edited footage of Eddie going into the room together with the rest and fixed the senator's hair and made it perfect had they not wasted the time pointlessly removing Eddie from the disc. Jingo says "in Japan" they would've done it right. Ha! With Japan's infallible, honest police force and 90% conviction legal system, I'm sure they would have avoided their obvious blunders and done a perfect job. Ha ha ha. Yeah, right.

It's entertaining enough but the politics were dated even when Crichton wrote the book. For a while people really thought Japan would usurp America as the dominant economic force on the planet. Then Japan's economy went into the toilet in the 1990s and that never really happened.