Movies: Geroppa! (Get Up!)

Hanemura’s love for James Brown is not just fandom; it borders on religion. When packing up a few mementos, he unearths the cape “J.B.” himself tossed from the stage during that last concert so many years ago, and weeps with joy. The good times have passed him by, but he can still rekindle them. So infectious is his enthusiasm that he and Kaneyama leap to their feet in midsentence while on the bullet train and begin fancy-footing right then and there to “Sex Machine” (much to the astonishment of their fellow passengers, many of whom are trying to get through the aisle). The scene is doubly funny if you have seen Kishibe before (in the likes of Gojoe and Violent Cop) playing dour, humorless types.

The daughter, Kaori (Takako Tokiwa), doesn’t remember much of her father except for a particularly bloody assassination attempt years ago. She’s gone on and found a life without him, raising a rather prodigious little girl on her own and finding good-but-not-great work as an entertainment promoter for celebrity impersonators. It doesn’t help that the manager of the theme park where she’s staging her current concert is a hopeless lech, and that work may prevent her from showing up for her daughter’s school concert. Hanemura decides that he needs to make contact with Kaori personally, and sends Kaneyama and his cronies off on a mission to kidnap James Brown (who’s in Tokyo for a concert) for a “special appearance.”

This is where the movie goes haywire, at least partly, and turns into something like a Japanese version of a John Landis film. The would-be kidnappers snag James Brown from the hotel — actually, no, they don’t; they wind up snatching Willy, a hapless James Brown impersonator who’s in town as part of Kaori’s revue. On top of that, there’s a couple of government agents sniffing around after the bunch of them, because of some secret package that contains scandalous photos of the Prime Minister. It hardly matters, because the tangled plotting is mostly used as an excuse for pratfalls and all manner of silly nonsense. I always get fed up when a comedy sets up an overly complex plot and then makes the mistake of taking it seriously.

The movie’s climax is no less absurd. With Willy missing from the revue, Hanemura (who feels partly responsible for the mess) steps onto the stage, seizes the mike, and fulfills a decades-old dream by doing his own spot-on rendition of “Sex Machine” for the crowd. This is hilarious, but the movie then tacks on another fifteen minutes of encounters, resolutions, partings, revelations, and, yes, funky dance steps. As cute as much of this stuff is, it feels overlong and overbaked, and I kept thinking they could have sliced the film down a bit and not lost anything. Do we really need the scene where Hanemura uses his pet lizard to scare off a debtor? Or the endless byplay between the two government agents, who are not particularly engaging to begin with?

When the movie isn’t going into a spindizzy over its contrived plotting, it is actually very funny. Two scenes in particular come to mind. In the first, Hanemura brings his lieutenants (a couple of guys in their twenties) into a family restaurant to break the bad news to them. They listen to him, fingering their gold chains and goatee mustaches, and when he tells them the clan is to be disbanded, they pound the table and weep and throw themselves into the floor like children. Even funnier is the scene where Hanemura finds Kaori’s apartment, encounters her daughter’s babysitter (who’s in her forties), freaks out at how badly she’s aged, and then gets into a wrestling match with the little girl over the phone as she sternly tells her mommy there’s some weird old man in the house. The best by far is a scene, the logic of which is next to impossible to relate here, where Hanemura gets into a conversation with a lady cabdriver that ends both in tears and with Hanemura cussing out the guys in the car behind them.

I have a hard time saying no to a movie that is good-natured fun even if it’s flawed. I didn’t mind how messy and chaotic Volcano High was, because it redeemed even its worst excesses with visual flair and high good humor. Geroppa! doesn’t get everything right, but it gets the most important stuff right, and yes, dammit, there is something inherently funny about someone saying “Stay on the scene / Like a sex machine!” in a Japanese accent.