An incorrigible playboy spots a young woman at a diner in Hawaii and is instantly smitten. After he plucks up the courage to talk to her, they hit it off and arrange to meet again at the same place the following day. But when he goes back, she treats him like a complete stranger. It turns out she has a form of amnesia that makes her forget everything that happened the previous day — but he sets out to woo her anyway. Sound familiar?

This story has been told before, in the 2004 film "50 First Dates," which fashioned a romantic comedy from the kind of plot device normally reserved for Hitchcockian thrillers and episodes of "Black Mirror." Conceived as a vehicle for Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, it was an inconsistent mix of gross-out comedy and more earnest drama that enjoyed only a modest box-office haul in Japan.

Yet here it is again, over a decade later, in a patchily entertaining and wholly unnecessary Japanese remake. The film is a reunion for Takayuki Yamada and Masami Nagasawa, who co-starred in the 2007 romance "Say Hello for Me," but also for writer-director Yuichi Fukuda and the cast of his irreverent late-night TV series, "Yusha Yoshihiko" ("The Hero Yoshihiko"). Initially, it looks like the movie might cater more to fans of the latter — but, much like first dates, first impressions can be misleading.