In the summer of 2021, as COVID-19 case numbers were surging in Japan and the health care system was threatening to buckle, TV viewers retreated into a fantasy world. TBS drama “Tokyo MER: Mobile Emergency Room,” the season’s biggest hit, followed the exploits of a team of medics who were dispatched to the scenes of accidents and disasters in a truck equipped with its own operating theater.
Led by Kota Kitami (Ryohei Suzuki), a buff surgeon with a talent for triage and a casual disregard for safety protocols, the medics would regularly put their own lives at risk in order to ensure there were zero casualties. At a time when ambulance crews were struggling to find hospitals that would accept COVID patients, it was a pure comfort watch. In the world of “Tokyo MER,” there is always someone to catch you when you fall — invariably in slow motion.
Suzuki’s maverick medic and his crew are back for this tolerably entertaining big-screen outing, which boasts a more lavish budget but otherwise doesn’t mess with the formula. Its most obvious model is “Code Blue: The Movie,” another TV medical drama spin-off that cleaned up at the Japanese box office in 2018 with ¥9.3 billion, though the film’s combination of disaster-movie spectacle and superhuman heroism also recalls the “Umizaru” series (2004-12).