Monday

Impressions before seeing it
Found it on TV and it sounded cool - one of those "guy wakes up and doesn't know how he got where he is" type movies, which I always find interesting. Plus it's Japanese.

How was it?
Monday started out just fine: our main character wakes up in a hotel room, confused and disoriented, and then he remembers being at a funeral where the guests are informed that the deceased's pacemaker is still on, so somebody (him) needs to cut him open and snip a wire to turn it off before the cremation makes the corpse explode. Wrong wire is cut, corpse explodes. That is a cool opening to a movie, and by that point I was ready to enjoy this mother.

Unfortunately that was about the only part I did enjoy. Throughout the rest of the movie, our hero has more flashbacks about what he's done and why he's in a hotel room, but that story was kind of bland rather than something a little more interesting like other movies in that style such as Saw or Unknown. And apart from that, a lot of the scenes seemed to drag on too long, which isn't always a problem in some movies and it wasn't a problem in the opening funeral scene of this one, but in the scenes following it there wasn't a reason for it because nothing new was happening that wasn't already happening five minutes ago when the scene started.
And finally, the ending left me unimpressed because it made the movie feel like one long public service announcement against guns and alcohol.

Recommendation
I think this movie is sort of like a Japanese Taxi Driver or Falling Down (which I still have yet to see, but I assume it's similar), but it didn't need to be. I really would not have guessed after seeing that cool opening that it would go in the direction it did, because it had greater potential than that. So, yeah, I was disappointed.