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List Price: $9.95 | | Label: Sony Pictures
Salesrank: 16772
Released: February 11, 2003 |
| Our Price: $5.20 |
| Used Price: $1.99 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
No Description Available.
Genre: Foreign Film - French
Rating: R
Release Date: 1-JAN-2007
Media Type: DVD
Description of Wasabi:
This high-energy Dirty Harry in Japan stars Jean Reno (The Professional) as a maverick Paris cop with sledgehammer fists and a short temper. Promoted to sudden fatherhood when he "inherits" a spunky Japanese daughter (Ryoko Hirosue) he never knew, he becomes her droopy guardian angel, protecting her from an army of yakuza gangsters. Written and produced by Luc Besson, the former fashionista director of Euro-sleek shoot-'em-ups, this colorful B-movie blast is as gritty as an oil slick on a water slide but packed with explosive action. Director Gerard Krawczyk punctuates his gunfights with the Hong Kong school of recoil (bullets blast victims across the screen) and an undercurrent of humor. As long as you don't lean too hard on such niggling details as logic, legality, and the laws of physics, this silly, splashy, family bonding bulletfest is a spirited good time. --Sean Axmaker
Wasabi Reviews:
Story makes no sense. 
2009-12-09 - Don't know if it's a drama, action, or comedy. The story goes back and forth, still deciding what type of movie it should be. If expecting it to be like a charles bronson, or clint eastwood dirty harry type of film, can forget about it. Save your money, and purchase "The Professional". Jean Reno in The Professional is way much better. Wolverines fan.
The Jean Reno Invasion 
2009-09-14 - Great set-up/story. Great characters. Two things I would have liked: more confrontational scenes between Reno & the bad guy and his goons; and the action ending more drawn-out and more creative than a simple bank shoot-out.
Classic Role, Weak Plot
2009-08-27 - `Wasabi', a film directed by Gerard Krawczyk and more importantly written by Luc Besson (`The Professional', `The Fifth Element', `La Femme Nikita') and starring Jean Reno (of many of the same films), is a French take on the American Dirty Harry / Axel Foley type of loose cannon policeman played by Jean Reno in place of Eastwood and Murphy. This may be a bit odd as Reno is much less the hot Murphy figure as he is the French equivalent of the modern Noir hero as played by Harvey Keitel. In fact, Reno and Keitel played exactly the same role in `La Femme Nikita' and the less successful American remake.
The unfortunate thing is that while the plots of `Dirty Harry' and `Beverly Hills Cop' are an interesting framework on which the rogue cop struts his stuff, the plot of `Wasabi' is almost inconsequential. That doesn't mean the film is not fun to watch, as Reno and his two primary supporting characters do great jobs of bulking up their characters to fill out the absence of a meaningful plot.
The story, briefly, is based on Reno's character, Hubert Fiorentini, a Paris policeman and former French intelligence agent in Tokyo is summoned to Tokyo because he is the only beneficiary in the will of a Japanese girlfriend who jilted him 19 years earlier when they both worked in the French embassy in Tokyo, Reno as an intelligence operative and girlfriend as a crypographer.
In Tokyo, we meet the second of the three main characters, an operative colleague of Fiorentini both were France's covert strongarms in Tokyo. Soon, when Hubert sees the lawyer probating the will, we meet the third major character, the 19 year old daughter of the Japanese code breaker and our Hubert. Daughter does not know Hubert is her father, and threatens to kill her father when she meets him. Daughter is a chip off the old Nikita character block, slightly younger, less larcenous, and certainly less dopy, but just as manic and irresponsible.
The big surprise which drives what is taken for a plot in the movie is when Hubert discovers that dead girlfriend / mother has $200,000,000 in her Japanese bank accounts in trust for soon to be legally adult daughter. It seems, however,that this money was somehow taken from a Japanese gangster who does a rather poor imitation of Italian-American gangsters as depicted by directors far less talented or imaginative than Martin Scorsese or Frances Coppela. With a combination of the fact that our Nippon scarface (yes, he has prominent scars on his face) has relatively inept bodyguards and the fact that our hero Hubert is something of especially adept at fanciful means of incapacitating bad guys, Hubert is able to keep himself and daughter out of scarface's clutches for most of Act II.
In the last act, with the help of some heavy duty hardware from the French Tokyo cold war stash of weapons and Hubert's Tokyo wingman, Hubert ultimately teletransfers the money out of the bad guys' clutches and take down the whole gang with help from his long dormant network of Tokyo operatives.
The fact that it is so much fun to write this review is a sure sign that the movie is fun to watch, at least once. The problem is whether or not the DVD is worth buying. The thin plot never explains how dead girlfriend got the 200 million bucks from scarface or exactly how girlfriend died or what connection a hidden notebook had to the case or even why the seeming larceny occurred many years ago, as 4/5 of the loot was interest, which could only have accrued over many years.
The point of the title is based on no more than a sight gag of Reno's character eating gobs of undiluted Wasabi with no sigh that he senses the very high heat in this Japanese horseradish. The point is made when faithful henchman eats a small portion himself and is rewarded with a scorched mouth which he demonstrates clearly with mumbles and large amounts of drinking water.
Very few comedies wear well after multiple viewings. Aside from Shakespeare's comedies and Woody Allen movies, there are very few I consider worth owning, and this is not one of them, although I sincerely enjoyed the experience of watching it the first time, as I am something of a Jean Reno fan.
Note that like most French movies, watching with the original French soundtrack and English subtitles is superior to watching the dubbed English, as you always loose something in the inflections of the dubbed speech. And, the two translations are different, and based on my rudimentary High School French, I think the subtitled translation is better.
WASABI 
2009-04-27 - The movie was easy to locate by the leading persons name. I find Jean Reno to be very good in his role as a detective, never getting over his love for a young lady he had not seen in 18 years and to later find out that he has a daughter by her and that she was murdered. I enjoyed him in the Professional as a hit man who finds a liking for a young girl who hires him to put a hit out on a policeman who kills her family in this movie. I just resently leaned how to surf the internet so tried Amazon again to find this movie. I do find it easy to locate what I need through this websit.
Probably Reno's best non-English film
2008-08-08 - I remember seeing this movie on pay per view TV once and being awestruck by it. Now that I've seen it again, I've come to appreciate it more. It helps that I think Jean Reno is a marvelous actor, regardless of the kind of Hollywood crap he appears in these days (Da Vinci Code, the American Godzilla movie, the Rollerball remake).
The plot is a little cliched (character realizes he has a long-lost relative), and the additional element of the character traveling to Japan and experiencing culture shock is also a mild cliche, but the other elements of the film overcome this. This film almost never takes itself seriously, from the action scenes that last less than a minute to the film's terrific ending, which I refuse to spoil.
For the most part, Reno puts on a good performance, although he delivers his lines in a slight monotone. Michel Muller is the source of most of the film's humour (including a scene where Reno and Muller both try wasabi, with heavily varying reactions), and the other actors are generally good.
If you're looking for a snappy, self-mocking action film, this is definitely worth checking out. However, I recommend watching the movie in the original French with subtitles, as some of the voices in the dub are horrendous.
