People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan, review: a screamingly funny reunion gig

Dir: Jack Clough; Starring: Allan Mustafa, Hugo Chegwin, Asim Chaudhry, Steve Stamp, Daniel Sylvester Woolford, Lily Brazier, Ken Yamamura, Hitomi Sono. 15 cert, 97 mins

Sending the cast of a sitcom on holiday is less of a gimmick these days than a dubious British cultural tradition. It started in 1959, when the reluctant conscripts of The Army Game shipped out to the Middle East for the spin-off film I Only Arsked – and by the 1970s, the casts of shows like On the Buses and Are You Being Served? were touring such exotic locales as Pontins Prestatyn and Costa Plonka, bringing their vast television audiences along by the coach-load.

Even now, the tactic continues to yield healthy box office returns: ￡16 million for Absolutely Fabulous in 2016; ￡78.4 million for The Inbetweeners, somehow, across 2011 and 2014. So it should come as no surprise that the urban music entrepreneurs of People Just Do Nothing – the mockumentary series about the goings-on at Kurupt FM, Brentford’s premier pirate radio station – have decided to horn in on the action.

This time the destination is the Olympically topical city of Tokyo, where unbeknownst to the boys – MC Grindah (Allan Mustafa), DJ Beats (Hugo Chegwin), Steves (Steve Stamp), Decoy (Daniel Sylvester Woolford) and their wheeling-dealing sort-of-manager, Chabuddy G (Asim Chaudhry) – a popular game show has been using their 2016 track Heart Monitor Riddem as a jingle, and as a result the song’s become a cult hit. A Japanese record label offers to fly the boys over for a concert and publicity tour, which sounds like the big break they’ve been waiting for, and they hungrily accept. Only Steves has misgivings, namely Japan’s “massive drugs problem – you can’t get drugs anywhere.”

The ensuing fish-out-of-water escapade, partly shot guerrilla-style in Tokyo’s teeming streets and neon alleys, feels like a realistic best-case scenario – it’s a warm-hearted, splashily expansive reunion gig, with some screamingly funny new material and a willingness to tinker with the formula in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in the old half-hour format. But there’s an inevitable and perhaps unavoidable hitch. People in sitcoms generally don't change at all, while people in films can rarely afford not to – and a movie-sized plot, with its multiple emotional crests and dips, isn’t the kind of environment these characters were built to thrive in.

Perversely, that leaves Big in Japan feeling at its most aimless whenever it’s trying to get itself somewhere: the self-contained skits, muttered asides and gonzo running gags are the parts that really shine, from an ongoing misunderstanding about the Japanese custom of removing one’s shoes indoors to Chabuddy’s one-sided feud with the label’s unsettlingly slick A&R man, Taka (Ken Yamamura). It’s this sharply styled Machiavelli who insists the gang change their name from Kurupt FM to Bang Boys, in order to cement the association with the game show in their prospective new audience’s minds.

“There’s no band that sounds like a pirate radio station,” reasons Grindah. “There’s no band that sounds like a paedophile ring either,” Steves counters. Unlike Grindah, who’s spent the last three years working as a postman and is prepared to do anything to make this work, Steves and Beats are concerned the band are fast becoming sell-outs – though of course the underlying joke is they’ve absolutely nothing worth selling in the first place, and might as well ride this particular bullet train for all it’s worth.

Mustafa, Chegwin, Stamp and Chaudhry have now been playing these characters for a decade, and there’s real pleasure to be taken in the sheer ease with which they inhabit them and mine their mannerisms for micro-gags. Throwaway behavioural details are often as funny if not funnier than the showpiece punchlines here: I loved that Grindah eats a luxurious kaiseki meal by using a solitary chopstick as a single-pronged fork, but also that the film trusts you to notice that he’s doing, and nobody present – the supposed documentary camera operator included – seems to think it’s worth drawing attention to, and so the laugh quietly snowballs of its own accord.

These mechanisms just aren’t compatible with the parts of the film that require drama, so when Taka gets his comeuppance, as indeed he must, or Steves somehow manages to woo the group’s perky translator Miki (Hitomi Sono), it all feels a bit obligatory: they’re the parts no-one’s come to see, but which have to be there so there’s something to build the jokes around. Fortunately it ends on a compelling and unexpectedly sweet note, with a riff on the karaoke scene from Lost in Translation that replaces Roxy Music’s More Than This with The Streets’ 2004 garage ballad Dry Your Eyes.

“You've got to walk away now, it’s over,” the lads dolefully croon. But there’s mileage in them yet.

In cinemas from Wednesday 18th August