Japan Movie Review: Raju Murugan's 'Japan' is a collection of interesting ideas that never come together interestingly

For his 25th film, Karthi gets himself a cool name: Japan. (The reason behind the name is a nice little motivational bit of a story.) He gets himself a cool get-up: gold teeth, curly hair, and a wardrobe of blingy, crazy-print shirts. He gets himself a cool new voice that sounds like his inner child is complaining all the time. He gets himself a cool condition: he is HIV Positive. (That's not something you find many leading men line up for.) He gets himself no love interest. (Anu Immanuel plays an ex who remains an  ex.) He gets himself a cool profession: he's a burglar with a cool MO involving an injection. He gets himself a respected director in Raju Murugan, a fantastic cinematographer in Ravi Varman, who shoots with very less light, which is refreshing in a big-hero movie. What he forgets to get himself is a cool and coherent script.

Japan opens with two incidents: one out of a drama, and one out of a heist thriller. In the former, a young mother walks away from her drunk husband. In the latter, a jewellery shop is stripped clean of all its valuables. By the end of the film, you can see how these two incidents connect – but it's very, very tiresome to get there. I liked a lot of the ideas in the screenplay, like the fact that Japan has made a film about himself that has a coat capable of deflecting bullets. And how unconventional that the first romantic song in the film is given not to the hero but to a side character! How wonderfully bizarre that the hero (who is by now an anti-hero) claims to want sex with his ex! 

But these ideas are standalone pieces of imagination and they never come together in an interesting way. The writing, the staging – nothing helps. Every scene looks the same: some variant of Japan trying to evade the cops on his tail. And every scene makes your investment in the proceedings dip further. The film keeps juggling supposedly comic bits with waterguns with depictions of custodial torture, and the tonality is all over the place. Add to this the random lectures in the form of dialogues, and the real burglary here is that our desire to keep watching is steadily stolen. Only at the end did I reflect on an irony, that the film is actually a tragic drama about a man who wants to absolve himself of his sins. It feels like anything but that, and what a pity. The bigger tragedy is what Japan could have been!