This genre-bending thrill ride, the second and last film by Kazuhiko Hasegawa, is 145 minutes of... something. Based on a story by Leonard Schrader (the brother of Paul "Cinema is Dead" Schrader), The Man Who Stole the Sun is about a bumbling high school science teacher who becomes a hero for saving his students from a crazy gunman, and then decides to build his own atomic bomb with which to hold Tokyo hostage so he can have his bizarre requests fulfilled. He picks as his victim/executor, the dogged homicide detective Yamashita, and soon it becomes a battle of the wills between the two men as they attempt to one-up each other. At first it seems like our protagonist is building the bomb for the hell of it. He just up and decides to rob a nuclear power plant of its plutonium in a colorful pop-artesque sequence after teaching his students about atom bombs. But when his cat dies from radiation poisoning he seems to snap. Could this all be over the grief of his dead cat? Or does the inspiration come from a newspaper article about an old man who robs a policeman of his gun with sleeping gas? And then there is the young and attractive disc jokey who joins in on the fun with suicidal abandon. Is she in love with the mad bomber? Is he in love with her? Things kind of just happen here. The rough-and-tumble shooting style and the breezy jazzy soundtrack lends the film an air of the spontaneous. Maybe that is what this is all about, spontaneity, taking things as they come. In that light, the rather expected yet unexpected ending takes on a new light.
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