User Reviews

"Robu" is a co-production between the United States and Japan from 2019, June actually, so this film is really almost exactly five years old now. This may vary depending on when you get here to read this review of mine. The writer and director was Kai Hasson and this is perhaps his most known work until now. He also worked on some official Youtube best-of-the-year video(s), but those are always a bit questionable in terms of the quality and the people they feature. Talk about false heroes. That is another story though. Let's stay with this one: The co-writer here is Josh Hallman and he and Hasson also collaborated on the other stuff I just mentioned. The big name attached to this film that runs for under 20, actually under 19 minutes is lead actor Jharrel Jerome. It was also in 2019 when he won an Emmy, so at a really young age and of course he was featured in two very big films, one of those as a voice actor. With his movie here I cannot say a lot about the rest of the cast really because I do not know the performers, but the Asian actresses are pretty attractive. This film is set in Asia, so it is only fitting that this was also where the movie scored its only awards recognition. Given Jerome's name now, I am a bit surprised that this was only rated 35 times on imdb so far, probably because it was almost impossible to find for many years, but now for a while it is available on Youtube and scored approximately 150k views since then. I personally preferred the first 10 minutes or first half of the film here compared to the second half where the film gets a bit more serious and there is more talk about the father. The dramatic component from this film did not really win me over. I preferred the lightness early on when he is looking for the sequel and talking to new friends, even if you could kinda guess that it was not only the hunt for a comic book that brought him to the other end of the planet, even if one male character especially would have liked that idea.

Here and there, we also get some language struggles, like when the main character does not understand what locals say to him or also when Asian characters repeat the words of the main character because they do not understand either. That comic book store early on was totally spectacular though. How massive! Unfortunately, as I stated earlier already, I felt that the film got weaker the longer it went. The coincidence that the boy saw a building that was depicted the exact same way in his book was also a bit too much. Can't let them get away with it unfortunately there. And how the main character at the very end of the movie in the last shot is depicted pretty much like a comic book character himself also did nothing for me. This is why my initial tendency to give this film a thumbs-up is something I have to revoke and overall it is a thumbs-down then for me. Even if you are really fascinated by Asian/Japanese culture, then it is not a particularly good watch. I found it also a bit odd that the main character maybe tells history to those other guys, but in the end the film does not end with the bunch. So yeah, there area handful inclusions in the script that could have been handled better. It's a negative recommendation overall for me.