The film stars Sean Connery (who was also an executive producer), Wesley Snipes, Harvey Keitel, Tia Carrere, Mako and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa.

[3] During a commencement gala at the newly opened Los Angeles headquarters of Nakamoto, a Japanese keiretsu, call girl Cheryl Lynn Austin was strangled while having rough sex on the boardroom table.

Smith and Connor suspect Eddie Sakamura, Cheryl's boyfriend and agent of a Nakamoto rival, of killing her, and interrogate him at a house party.

Nakamoto is in the midst of sensitive negotiations for the acquisition of an American semiconductor company, with Senator John Morton, a guest at the party, abruptly changing his stance on a bill that would prevent the merger from going through.

Regrouping with Connor and Jingo, the three view the original surveillance footage, which shows Senator Morton having sex with Cheryl and performing erotic asphyxiation on her.

Bob Richmond, an American lawyer working for Nakamoto, reveals that he is the real killer and tries to run away, only to be killed by Eddie Sakamura's yakuza friends.

Smith drives Jingo home, where she casts doubt on whether Richmond was really the murderer, or if he was simply taking the fall to protect someone higher up in the company.

Crichton also was not in favor of the decision by Kaufman and Joe Roth to cast Wesley Snipes as the protagonist, therefore changing the character's race from Caucasian to African-American.

[11] Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote of Rising Sun "a supposed thriller about Japanese corporate skullduggery in L.A. that zigzags and crosses its own trail so often that it's dizzyingly tedious long before the end.