THE MAGIC HOUR DVD Review

When you're up to your knees in a bucket of concrete and about to be dumped in the sea, you'll say pretty much anything. For small-time hustler Bingo (Satoshi Tsumabuki), it's a seemingly innocuous fib: after being caught sleeping with his boss's moll, Mari (Eri Fukatsu), he rescues them both from a watery grave by claiming acquaintance with the renowned hitman Della Togashi. The only problem is that he now has five days to bring Togashi to his boss - and, of course, he hasn't got a clue who he is.

Neither does anyone else, for that matter - well, what he looks like, at least - leading Bingo to concoct an unlikely scheme. He decides to hire an actor to impersonate the famed assassin, plumping for one Taiki Murata (Koichi Sato), a second-rate hack who scrapes by on a gruel-like diet of bit parts and body double work. Posing as a movie director, he propositions Murata to star as a hitman in his debut feature, shot guerrilla-style with minimal preparation and no real script. Amazingly, everyone buys it - and that's when the problems start.

There's nothing remotely plausible about the premise of Koki Mitani's The Magic Hour, but then that's the point. This a film with a deliberately haphazard grasp on reality, taking place in a town that looks like nothing so much as a 1940s movie set and culminating in a showdown that the characters literally stage themselves - lights, explosions and all.

"I feel like I'm in a movie," Bingo's colleague Natsuko (Haruka Ayase) observes early on. "Gangs, a hitman, cement shoes. It hardly seems real." She isn't the only one. In his free time, Murata obsessively re-watches an old film noir that his father took him to see as a child, imagining himself in the role of the doomed antihero. Given the chance to act out these fantasies, he immerses himself in the experience, pulling his best Riki Takeuchi impersonation and barely thinking to stop and ask for directorial guidance. At one point, he even pretends to peel his own face off, Mission Impossible style, in order to convince a rival gang boss of his true identity - a scene of quite sublime weirdness that lingers long after the credits have rolled.

Mitani doesn't pursue this meta angle as far as he perhaps could: at heart, he's still a crowd-pleaser, and he fulfills this role as effortlessly as ever. I can't think of any other Japanese director producing as consistently entertaining comedies at the moment, films in which everyone involved seems to be having a blast. Sato, in particular, is on top form, but I also enjoyed Fukatsu's coquettish femme fatale and Toshiyuki Nishida's gang boss - a comparatively restrained performance, by his standards. Keep an eye out, too, for cameos by SMAP's Shingo Katori and director Kon Ichikawa, in his last screen role.

The Magic Hour isn't Mitani's best film - if only because it's a bit too long and lacks the ambition of some of his larger ensemble comedies - but it's a more than worthwhile addition to his canon: a paean to cinema and the joys of getting lost in your own fantasies from time to time.