Kido (Kenji Sawada) is a high school science teacher, known to his pupils as bubble gum, because of his habit of constantly chewing and blowing bubbles. He is regarded as an eccentric, but harmless man. But Kido has only one thing in mind - to build an atomic bomb. In order to achieve his goal, he physically trains himself, and steals a gun, in order to break into a nuclear power plant facility to steal an isotope to extract enough plutonium for the bomb.
While Kido is planning this, he meets inspector Yamashita (Bunta Sugawara, Battles without Honor and Humanity series), a ridiculously straight-up G-man with a buzzcut, when an unhinged WWII veteran, armed with a machine gun and grenades, hijacks Kido's school bus full of students, demanding to talk to the emperor. After the ordeal, which results in Kido and Yamashita saving the day and the gunman dead, Kido takes Yamashita as a worthy future opponent.
The actual break-in to the nuclear powerplant and ensuing making the bombs in a makeshift lab in Kido's tiny apartment, has a slapstick comedy element to it.
The film is also extremely procedural - showing Kido's bomb making almost step-by-step, as if in an instructional video. After successfully making two bombs - one with just enough plutonium to be detectable, so the authorities would take him seriously, and the other full working bomb with the timer, Kido starts making demands in a series of calls, using a voice scrambler. But his demands are silly - to have a baseball game aired on TV in its entirety instead of cutting the broadcast off at 9pm (which was a standard), and to get the Rolling Stones perform in Japan. His frustration at the society is well defined, but not what he wants. Throw in a beautiful radio personality, Zero (Kimiko Sawai), who figures out who Kido really is, but instead of giving him up to the authorities, she takes his case as a big exclusive scoop. Even if it means she gets involved romantically with him, and knowing Kido is dying of radiation poisoning. The cat and mouse chase ensues between Kido and Yamashita.
The Man Who Stole the Sun balances on the tight rope between not-so-serious and serious, full on satire and serious inquiry into the nation's psyche - the miraculous post-war economic development and consumerism, the generational gap- exemplified by the long-haired, aloof, rebel without a cause Kido and the overly stereotypical G-man, the unbending public servant, Yamashita. And of course, underlying of it all - the nation's ironic dependence on its nuclear energy and it being the source of existential threat (Fukushima anyone?)
As the two and a half hour movie unfolds, things get more and more outrageous - the massive car chase, shootouts, helicopters, daring stunts. Hasegawa's film has the same manic energy and chaotic nature of Shinji Somai's 80s output.
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