Big Man Japan

Introduction

 
Masuru Daisato (Hitoshi Matsumoto) is a seemingly ordinary man living in Tokyo who is the seemingly bizarre subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary.  Daisato is a middle-aged nobody who lives by himself in a small house surrounded by graffiti and rubbish and has his windows broken randomly during which Daisato seems totally and blissfully unaware.


 
Slowly we get to see that Daisato isn't a nobody, he's actually Dai-Nipponjin aka Big Man Japan.  So what's a Big Man Japan?  It's a bloke on call 24 hours a day as Japan's first line of defence when cities on the Japanese mainland are attacked by a never-ending supply of bizarre monsters who like nothing better than pounding buildings to rubble.  When provided notice of such an attack, Dai-Nipponjin must take a trip to a local power station, step into a giant pair of purple pants, have electrodes attached to his nipples and then be electrocuted.  And why?


 
Because Dai-Nipponjin is transformed by the large scale electrocution into a thirty foot giant with a big hair and a bigger stick with which to clout the monster of the day.  Once struck on the head, the monster dies and disappears in a ray of light.
 
Now you'd think that Dai-Nipponjin would be a big hero in Japan, just like his ancestors and especially his grandfather, the Fourth Dai-Nipponjin.  But no, if only life were so simple.  Times have changed and the Japanese people actually detest him for being so noisy and destructive, jumping all over their cities and causing as much destruction as the monsters he fights.  It's a thankless job…
 


And if that wasn't enough, he also has to contend with an overbearing female agent who tries to raise his profile by arranging to brand him with sponsorship logo's on his bare body, although in keeping with his late night TV slots and dropping ratings, the sponsors aren't particularly top range.  Oh, and his grandfather who suffers from Alzheimer's has a tendency to get himself electrocuted so that he can transform into the Dai-Nipponjin and relive the old days…


 

Overall

 
When you're big in Japan tonight,
Big in Japan, be tight,
Big in Japan where the eastern sea's so blue...
Big in Japan, alright, pay, then I'll sleep by your side,
Things are easy when you're big in Japan, when you're big in Japan.

Except it's not...

Monster movies are back in vogue these days but Japan has had a long standing love of the monster genre with giant monsters raising merry hell on Japanese cities.  Japanese comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto has an interesting spin on it though with this mockumentary film that follows the exploits of a one man defense who fights a succession of increasingly bizarre monsters whilst leading a rather low key and boring life with a background of scorn and derision from the public he is sworn to protect.
 


The film starts rather slowly, which will be a problem for some, but there is plenty of understated laughs almost from the beginning.  Matsumoto is superb in this and not only starred in this but also co-wrote and directed this satirical comedy.  In best mockumentary fashion (in the same week I watched the blu-ray release of Spinal Tap), everything is played dead-pan serious and understated.
 


The main attraction is clearly the monsters and the fights, and they don't disappoint even though they are clearly not at the cutting edge of CGI.  Each successive monster seems even more ludicrous than the last and apart from a love of jumping on and demolishing buildings, none of them really seem that threatening.  And no one actually seems to die despite the huge destruction, unless the Japanese public portrayed here are more annoyed about the noise caused by Dai-Nipponjin and his monster opponents rather than the death of countless people.


 
This really is a lot of fun if you can persevere with the languid pace and is quite hilarious.  It's extremely funny with Matsumoto but the bizarre appearance of the frankly bananas grandfather in his own giant sequence is quite possibly the funniest bit in the entire film.  The only complaint I have really is that the final ten minutes is completely bizarre and incomprehensible.
 
Other than that, this is great…