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‘Faceless’: Fugitive thriller turns a blind eye to hard truths

Fugitives in Japan enjoy a curious celebrity, their faces plastered on billboards and regularly featured in TV news segments. It’s a marvel that some of them manage to evade capture for so long. Suspected terrorist Satoshi Kirishima had been at large for nearly 50 years when he revealed his true identity in January, shortly before dying from cancer. Maybe it helped that the photo in his wanted poster — long-haired, fresh-faced and smiling — didn’t look like someone who was a menace to society.

In Michihito Fujii’s “Faceless,” a convicted murderer played by Ryusei Yokohama goes on a year-long, cross-country flight from justice. The people he encounters invariably come away convinced of his innocence. Why? Because he’s a nice guy.

He’s also hot, which is a liability in a film with a title like this (the original Japanese, “Shotai,” translates literally as “true identity”). Someone as dishy as Yokohama would never manage to go unnoticed for long, even with the range of disguises that his character adopts.

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