I gotta admit, I love the premise of Big Man Japan; a mockumentary about a washed-up super hero that defends Japan from invading giant monsters. However, the film has some problems in the execution that keep me from loving the movie as much as I do the concept.
The film is broken up into documentary-style segments, showing the mundane, sometimes depressing, everyday life of our hero (when he's normal size) mixed with outrageous CGI fight scenes of the Big Man fighting a wide array of bizarre (and often hilarious) monsters threatening to destroy the city. The CGI isn't great, but looks good enough and the character/monster design is very unique and creative. The main problem I have is that the documentary segments get pretty boring and tend to drag on far too long, especially at the beginning of the film where it feels like it takes forever to get going. However, the film definitely picks up steam and is actually quite smart and funny.
Had Hitoshi Matsumoto (who directed and stars as the title character) trimmed some of the more boring scenes and cut this down to a lean 90 minutes, I would probably have given this 4 stars, however, it's still a weird, unique and fun movie that I would recommend. It's like "This Is Spinal Tap" meets "Ultraman". How can you not love that?
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