Welcome gentle readers to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today it’s Japanese thriller, The Man Who Stole The Sun:
and next week’s film, Dersu Uzala:
Reviews of The Man Who Stole the Sun:
Letterboxd says:
Probably one of the coolest films I’ve ever seen. You got our lead inspector—awesomely played by Bunta Sugarawa-—kicking a kidnapper’s arse and taking him down in one of the most badass fashions. Our lead villain is like a terrorist version of Walter White, where instead of selling drugs, he builds up a nuclear bomb and threatens to make it go kaboom! All while chewing and popping his gum, walking around with such confidence. And that whole third act where a dude hangs from a helicopter while shooting someone with his big gun. On top of that, the whole film is incredibly shot. I mean, something as mundane as the scene in the train station looked stunning. And the score is a lowkey bop.
All in all, it slows down in the middle where it focuses more on the preparation of the bomb and a romance, but otherwise, the film is such a thrill ride, an underrated gem of propulsive and exciting crime action cinema.
BTW: the fact director Kazuhiko Hasegawa only directed two films is criminal.
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This movie’s out to roast everybody: skewering mass media, generational conflict, global arms treaties, and lone-gunmen terrorist narratives. There’s plenty to dig into. And it (kinda surprisingly) has a more sophisticated understanding of politics than more explicitly political thrill rides (STRANGELOVE, THEY LIVE, etc).
But that’s not what makes this movie Great. I have not seen a movie escalate like THE MAN WHO STOLE THE SUN, my god. I was invested in this as a slow paced kinda technical thriller: watching a lonely weirdo wield too much power and accidentally best a lot of competent people stuck in an incompetent bureaucracy.
And then there’s a solid hour of pedal-to-the-floor nonstop action. I’m not sure I took a breath in the second half of this movie. It’s unreal.
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A black-comedy crime thriller would have probably been enough to hook me in. But then it kindly added in the story being about a possibly existential-crisis-having domestic terrorist holding Japan to ransom over things suggested to him in a radio poll…I mean; sold. You can’t argue with a demanded Rolling Stones concert as a plot device.
Yes, you could look for all kinds of clever social commentary in here about science and war and discontent and weapons of mass destruction. But that sounds dull and preachy, which this very much isn’t. What it is; is an offbeat epic that manages to incorporate at least five crime film genre tropes into one story. It’s got your heists, your hijacking, your car chases, your sieges and your shifting cat and mouse action. And as I like a good crime film, you can imagine how being offered a smorgasbord of it filled me with delight.
Also, the constant changing is a very clever way to keep the story feel exciting and full of momentum as it takes you through a what very could have easily been onerous two and a half hour run time. But it passed very easily, even if it does sag a tad in the middle. And obviously it’s helped by the charming lead performances, where you have Kenji Sawada giving depressed-angsty-goofiness and Bunta Sugawara as the no nonsense cop that bullets can’t keep down.
It somehow manages to und up feeling singular but also familiar. Like it has shapes that you know, but that have been put together differently. And all of this could be said more simply: it’s a really good and unique film, don’t let the length put you off.
My take: A dark yet funny tale. The protagonist doesn’t seem to have a point to his madness. It’s as if he is just doing it because he is bored. Maybe that’s the point. The action gets a little zany, but it adds to the film instead of detracting from it. There’s a nice nod to Taxi Driver as well. The two films share some common themes: disassociation, isolation, and nihilism. A good watch but only once:⭐.
Director: Kazuhiko Hasegawa
Written by: Leonard Schrader, Kazuhiko Hasegawa
Plot (Spoilers!):
Makoto Kido is a disaffected high school science teacher who becomes a super-villain. He steals a quantity of plutonium from a local power plant. He makes two bombs with it; one is a fake and the other is very real.
He uses the threat of a bombing to extort the government. First, he demands that baseball game broadcasts be shown in their entirety instead of being cut off at 9PM. Then he demands that the Rolling Stones be allowed to play in Japan. He is drunk with power.
The police, in the form of a grizzled detective named Yamashita, are hot on Kido’s trail. The cop and the terrorist collide and a struggle ensues. The cop falls to his death. At the end of the film a ticking sound is heard. Then an explosion.
***
Bonus: Ballet Mécanique (1924)
An avant garde silent French film that is one of the earliest examples of experimental cinema:
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“Ballet Mécanique”
Considering today´s popularity of subjective POV-shots and those pointing at the actors with GoPros and other gadgets (here: the lady on the swing) the term fits “It´s so old it´s new”.
Also the use of such geometric graphics was regarded as timely even 50 years later when manipulation of brains (“PARALLAX VIEW”) had to be translated into cinematic means.
And then the score: Like a bold mixture of Prokofiev´s Piano Sonata No. 7 and Stravinsky´s “Sacre” – however before the fact, as Prokofiev at least wrote his piece 18 years later.
p.s. Researching an idea about investigating crimes and dreams I gotta look into PAPRIKA again… on that note I ran across a 1980s short story by Gene Wolfe, „The Detective of Dreams“. All of which items that share the insane logic of nightmares – which might be another way into above shorty. Or to quote the intro to Welles´s “TRIAL” “the logic of a nightmare”.
“The Man Who Stole the Sun” was definitely intriguing (although I skipped the part of how the guy made the bomb since I didn’t accept any of that) and enjoyable. However, at about the two-hour mark when bursting through plate glass and shooting all the cops and stealing his bomb from them, that’s when the movie lost me. It was preposterous throughout but then became silly. Nevertheless, it was definitely worth seeing – once.
One for the algorithm.
Comments Mecanique.
Excellent film.
High School Science Teacher vs. a Cop, i.e., the State.
In the (heavily ironic) scene with the yakuza-poi politicians — “Individuals don’t need A-bombs. Only nations [kokka] do.” — they are talking about the state [kokka], not the nation, and we know what Max Weber had to say about the state’s “monopoly on violence”.
For context, bear in mind also that Japan is the only country to have experienced nuclear attacks, and follows the strict “Three Non-Nuclear Principles” against producing, possessing, or allowing nuclear weapons in the archipelago. However, the U.S. military has violated the third principle on a number of occasions, with a wink wink nudge nudge from the highest levels of the Japanese government.
Also, the Japanese domestic nuclear power program was specifically conceived with a fuel cycle that would produce a large stockpile of plutonium, ergo it doesn’t matter that the whole “reprocessing” part of the plan has failed (“completion date” of Rokkasho delayed indefinitely). Japan today has over 40 tons of plutonium, enough to build thousands of nuclear bombs, and as of April 2026, the Lethal Weapon Export Ban was lifted by the Takaichi govt.
It’s not hard to connect the dots here.
Another note about the film: the actor who plays Yamashita, the cop — Sugawara Bunta — was a real badass who generally played yakuza, most famously in Fukasaku Kinji’s Battles without Honor and Humanity (1973):
https://vk.com/video653173939_456239877
The iconic theme music is famous in Japan — 90 second intro of horns, reverb guitar, heavy bass —, and decades before Quentin Tarantino copped it for Kill Bill (2003).
thanks!