Like thousands of other Japanese visitors to this country, Midori - Youki Kudoh, and Yukio - Kenji Isomura - are honeymooners; but something`s wrong, there are strange tensions in the air. When Midori disappears, a kidnapping is suspected and the police are called in; but it soon turns out the disappearance was faked - Midori plans to meet a secret lover. Those plans don`t work out and the disoriented young woman finds herself in the wrong place, a bank, at the wrong time, during a robbery - now she`s kidnapped for real, and only saved from being killed thanks to the intervention of the getaway driver, Colin O`Brien - Russell Crowe. The couple find themselves on the run - from the police, from the seriously vengeful Yukio and Colin`s angry partners in crime...
Craig Lahiff has been making low budget, well crafted thrillers in Adelaide for several years and with Heaven`s Burning he finally gets a generous budget to prove that, as a director of action movies, he has all the requisite energy and vision - this film is very well directed. Surprisingly, Louis Nowra`s screenplay contains a few problems - Nowra commendably centres his script on the romance between the Aussie and the Japanese, but he makes Yukio a ridiculously over-the-top angel of vengeance and the muslim gangsters (they`re Afganis) are comic-strip characters.
The unfortunate scene in which Ray Barrett, splendid as Colin`s old digger father, launches into a lengthy anti-Japanese diatribe which would make even Pauline Hanson blanch, was included in the film, then removed, and now it`s back in again. I think it`s out of place and an ugly blemish on what is generally an excitingly staged and well acted romantic thriller.
