User Reviews

The Rising Sun of Death started out strong. A businessman is put to death at a Japaneses establishment! Miami Vice squad must investigate. The middle has an introduction of the Yakuza. Interesting to watch.R. Lee Ermey has a part as interdepartmental politics comes into play. The renegade cop, and the Yakuza sword show down is exciting ending.Regrettably the end was blunt. Too much of a condense story to pack into one episode. So much material The Rising Sun of Death ends too suddenly. The viewer is overwhelmed. The Rising Sun of Death should be a two part of episode. Six out of 10.

In the pre-credit sequence we see American businessman Colton Avery being wined and dined by Japanese businessman Riochi Tanaka; when he has finished eating his is taken away to have a good time with a couple of girls in a hot tub... it doesn't end well though as somebody interrupts them and drowns him. When his body is washed up in the bay Castillo wants vice to take the case as he suspects a Yakuza connection yet homicide cop Det. Sgt. Ernest Haskell seem a little too keen to write off the case as an accident. A background check suggests that while Tanaka may by one of Japan's wealthiest business executives he also has links to the Yakuza and was once accused of war crimes but never tried. Crockett and Tubbs go to check Avery's office but find the guard dead and have a run in with Yakuza gunmen. At the site they find a business card belonging to Japanese private investigator, and former cop, Kenji Fujitsu... things are getting complicated! They get even more complicated when Gina and Trudy go undercover only to be identified by a cop in the pay of Tanaka... Haskell!

After seeing Crockett married in the previous episode I feared that future episodes might be a little too 'soapy'; if this episode is anything to go by I needn't have worried. Their scenes together were limited to buying a house and talking about whether she should use the name Crockett or Burnett. The main story featured most of the team in fairly important roles although it was Castillo who takes the lead; this usually seems to happen when the case has Eastern connections. The story was interesting with some decent twists and more action than we have seen for some time; including a gun fight, a slow-motion sword fight and somebody committing hara-kiri! Notable guest stars included Full Metal Jacket's R. Lee Ermey, who played Haskell, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa who played Fujitsu.

I'm usually a big fan of episodes where Lt. Castillo is the major player, but this outing fails to deliver. The first 30 minutes of this episode is ruined by one dimensional, underwritten characters, predictable events and sloppy direction. At the center of this mess is R. Lee Ermey playing the archetypal crooked cop who might as well be wearing a sign saying: ON THE TAKE. We are also forced to believe the Yakuza boss MV is trying to take down was smart enough to avoid WW2 war crimes prosecution and the Russian army to become one of the richest men in the world, but is too stupid to avoid committing multiple murders of which MV would have to be brain dead to avoid putting the pieces together.

The writers also sell Castillo up the creek by forcing him to do the one thing he has never done in any episode of MV: operate outside of the law. Castillo has always been by the book, a trait that has dogged him since his black ops days in Vietnam, but in this episode all it takes to get him to disregard his code of ethics is to get a rogue cop from Japan to ask him to...just make sure he asks twice. So much for due process.

While the last 20 minutes improves on the first 30, it still suffers from a serious bout of lazy writing. So much exposition is delivered in scenes that outline every motive of the bad guys, it almost felt like outtakes from the unmaskings at the end of Scooby Doo. The writers also get all 'code of the warrior' happy near the end, punctuated by one of the sloppiest, slowest moving and poorly directed martial arts/sword fights ever put to film.

Things are going downhill...will Season 4 get back on track?