What would you do if you had only twelve hours to live? That question is posed by titles at the beginning of Too Tired to Die, directed by Wonsuk Chin. When the movie starts, twentysomething Kenji (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) has a dream that an Arab boy is being chased through Baghdad by two soldiers under the command of a woman in a veil. When he awakens in his New York apartment, his mother calls from Tokyo to ask him to pick up her friend’s son Yoichiro at JFK airport. Kenji reminds his mother to send money, which she promises to do, provided that he will look for a job next month. In short, handsome, youthful Kenji is trying to find himself in New York at his mother’s expense. After the telephone call, he walks to a café to drink coffee. En route, the same boy in the dream runs into him, trying to escape two men who are pursuing him on roller skates. He enters the café and orders, but soon a woman nearly collapses at the entry to the restaurant, so he quickly gets up, catches her before she falls, and is holding her while she regains her strength. He then offers her his coffee and converses, finding out that she is Pola (played by Geno Lechner), a German woman who lives in Paris, so he asks her to meet at the café at 6 p.m. for a date, though she is equivocal because she plans to fly back to Paris the following day with her boyfriend. While talking, he sees the same boy running, and he goes into the street to observe, but an angel (played by Mira Sorvino) appears, explains that the man has been running for years, kisses Kenji, leaves a stone to protect him from death, and disappears. When he returns to the café, Pola is gone, but his friend Fabrizio (played by Michael Imperioli) is present, and soon an African American patron (played by Jeffrey Wright) joins the conversation, opining that “You don’t know about life until you’ve lived it.” After visiting Fabrizio’s apartment and the Sage Art Gallery, he returns to the café for the date, which consists of walking to dine at a restaurant and then going to her hotel room, where her boyfriend is in bed asleep, so he gives her the stone as a present and leaves. After returning home for the night, he dreams that the angel is visiting him and his mother (played by Ako) in Tokyo. Sensing that the angel brings death, Kenji is rude to her, but his mother insists on being polite. When he wakes up, the angel appears, this time for real. The angel tells him that she has come for him; however, thanks to his help in catching the Arab boy, he has twelve more hours to live. Kenji then calls his mother, telling her that she need not send the money. He goes to JFK in search of the German woman, but she is nowhere to be found, so he rides back in a taxi along with a young girl who insists that sex is at the bottom of everything. Then he consults two fortunetellers; the first provides bullshit, so he takes his money back, but the second runs off, horrified. Next, he sees Fabrizio at work and insists that he has something important to say during his next break. Then he goes to the same art gallery, where he kisses a Korean girl whom he saw there earlier; the girl responds passionately and then leaves. When he goes to the café, the same girl, Anouk (played by Hye Soo Kim), is accompanied by fifty-eight-year-old John Sage (played by Ben Gazzara). When Anouk goes to the restroom, Kenji tries to tell Sage that he should not court someone so young but lets slip his understanding that he has only a few hours to live. When Anouk reappears, Sage invites Kenji to a dinner party at his SoHo apartment that night. After Fabrizio arrives at the café, Kenji tells him that he will be dying soon, they hug, but after leaving the café Fabrizio is killed in an auto accident. Kenji then kills time at a peep show in Times Square and by conversing with two prostitutes, a woman and a transsexual, and arrives on time for the party. During the party, Kenji asks Sage to explain the meaning of life, but Sage cannot do so. Then Kenji asks for permission to have sex with his girlfriend Anouk and kisses her, whereupon Sage erupts with anger, there is a scuffle, Anouk stabs him with a knife, and Kenji leaves. As he staggers down the street, he lurches toward onrushing cars but is saved by Yoichiro (played by Masa Sakamaki), who complains that he did not pick him up at JFK. Then Kenji goes home and commits hara-kiri. The angel of death arrives, but Kenji still has a few more minutes to live. Kenji begs to be taken away then, as he is “too tired to die,” whence the title for the movie. The film is supposed to be a comedy, laughing at the inevitability of death, and encouraging filmviewers to live life to the fullest before their death, but the story is much more somber than Meet Joe Black (1998), in which Brad Pitt plays Death but gets more involved with the character that he summons. In Too Tired to Die Death has emotions of her own in many different encounters and guises throughout the film but, similar to Joe Black, ultimately has no choice in her mission. Although Chin, the director, is trying to demystify death, the fact that Kenji is really unable to find any diversion or meaning in the twelve hours speaks volumes about most humans, who know that they will die someday but do not confront existential questions during most of their lives. The director selects a Japanese protagonist because he is fascinated that so many young men from Tokyo end up in New York unable to get a life. There are so many rules imposed on young people as they grow up in Japan that an aimless existence is the antidote for overconformity, but available only to those with rich parents. Those with terminal HIV or cancer confront a similar situation, and perhaps if we really listened to the subtexts of their requests to visit the ocean or to go to the zoo, we would better attend to their needs. It is a pity that Too Tired to Die, which begins with such an important question, simply provides no wisdom for anyone. MH