Cloud is a Japanese-language film that dips into home invasion and action genre tropes, but its social commentary is thin and the twist at the end is dumb enough to ruin the rest of the movie. The premise of this film is pretty convoluted and stupid: a young, smallish time dropshipper in Tokyo decides to quit his dayjob and go full-time selling scammy goods on the internet while also moving in with his girlfriend in the country. Hijinks ensue and people (spoilers ahead) who are weirdly intimately connected to his life suddenly hatch a plan to kidnap and murder him (much like in Assassination Nation, now that I think of it!), but their outsized violent response to what at most is a non-standard side hustle in his life that hasn’t really benefited the main character Ryosuke financially really serves as justification for him and his dopey assistant-turned-inexplicable sidekick to respond with ruthless and justified vengeance. So the film sort of lurches from creepy pasta relationship hustle story to home invasion to action movie at an agonizingly slow pace, before ultimately ending with the last lines of the movie in which the assistant encourages the main character to continue his little business of questionable ethics because it will allow him to acquire anything he wants, even the means to destroy the world, and its heavily implied that the little minion guy is actually some sort of infernal representative of evil incarnate despite the fact that there’s been no indication of such a supernatural presence to the film up until that point.
The movie does have some good elements of focalization (Fighting With My Family, Blinded by the Light, and Love, Simon also are kings of this narrative parlor trick) in which the protagonist seems like he’s doing something less than savory, but because we’re following his hustle and not the carcasses of innocents he leaves behind in his pursuit of a few thousand Yen, we sort of ignore the ethics of what he’s doing until his victims come roaring back. It’s just that the people he’s hurting don’t quite ever show up so much as the violent vigilantes who act as self-appointed representatives of the people he’s allegedly hurt, so it doesn’t quite feel as bad when Ryosuke kills them violently, because they seem like they deserve it in a way that the real victims wouldn’t (“Take THAT for daring to complain about how I sold you faulty medical devices!”).
Cloud is definitely not the movie you want to waste your time on if you’re looking for a mindless sequence of actors shooting each other up in a warehouse. The movie you’re thinking of is Free Fire and it’s ALSO bad.
