Five Million Dollar Life

"5 Million Dollar Life" Mirai Takatsuki (Ayumu Mochizuki) who was saved when he was a child by the kindness of strangers and those in his town who raised money for his medical bills is now filled with angst, feeling he can't live up to peoples expectation of who he should be after surviving and becoming a young man. He runs away from the town and his doting mother and goes on a Candide like adventure thru modern Japan. An oddball movie. Like many Japanese movies it starts out as if a specific genre movie then pivots several times, changing tone, mood, even genre.

At first it feels like a serious "something to say" movie but is it? Or is it an "Inspirational" teen movie? The mid-section is where it really meanders with oddball episodic incidents happening to the character, even going into teen sex comedy territory. Mirai Takatsuki doesn't really drive the story, he's not proactive. He meets interesting characters - one after another and gets into situations. Some a bit over the top and seem a different movie from the opening somber tone.

It has a lot of the classic themes of todays Japanese movies, TV, and pop culture. It's kind of a 'teen terminal illness' movie but not really. And you got family debt, teen suicide, sex industry, bribers/conmen...

It's has the typical weakness of Japanese screenplays, with a reactive passive main character, not a proactive character. The main character wanders thru life and things randomly happen to him. Episodic incidents that he's forced to react to. The subject of suicide is always a tricky one but by now it's a standard Japanese movie/TV trope. The suicidal girl in the movie is almost played for laughs.

Characters pop up out of nowhere - often in deus ex-machina ways. The movie is almost like a grab bag sampler of Japanese movies tropes/themes. It's got a dark commentary side on the pressures of Japanese culture and also wants to be an uplifting sappy teen movie at the same time.