No.71 : Wasabi (2001)

Wasabi at the IMDb

Jean Reno plays super cop Hubert Fiorintini in this Japanese/French comedy thriller written by Luc Besson.

Hubert is a kick ass style of police man and his carefree style puts him at loggerheads with the Chief, especially when the Chief’s son gets a kicking during one of Hubert’s raids. When his efforts to apologise to the boy results in his being electrocuted Hubert is told to take a couple of months of overdue leave. The timing of course is perfect as he soon learns that his lost love has died in Japan and he is the father of her daughter.

Hubert goes to Japan after a 19 year absence and hooks up with his former partner, Momo, who keeps him fully armed and informed. Hubert meets the girl but hides his identity as her father, as her mother spoke badly of him. We quickly learn that the woman was in fact murdered and has left the girl $200 million which she’ll collect on her 20th birthday in 2 days. Mum it seems was working undercover for the police and had to sever links with Hubert to preserve her identity.

The money was pilfered from the Yakuza and they are keen to collect. What follows are several elaborate shootouts interspersed with some buddy cop moments and culture clashes. Can Hubert reconcile his relationship with his newly found daughter and ease his own overdraft at the same time?

This is a strange film. It looks like it has been shot in French but has been dubbed by the crew at ‘Eurotrash‘. The dubbing is so funny it has to be a deliberate move to make the film seem more eccentric and wacky. Reno appears to have done his own English translation but the rest of the cast sound like leftovers from a 1970s kung-fu flick. Once you get over the voices, which are a bit distracting, there is a lot to like. The film is similar in style to the ‘Rush Hour’ series with lots of gun play but no blood and little danger to the leads.

The culture clash gags are well done and Tokyo looked great. There are funny scenes in the shops and especially in the amusement arcade where Reno shows his dance moves before playing the video shoot out game for real. The bad guys are cut out villains with black suits and sun glasses and I don’t think they get one bullet on target in the whole film.

The detection angle was very slight with barely a breath caught between each puzzle and its solution, but the fast paced action more than made up for that. Overall I enjoyed the film with the action set pieces such as the driving range fight well executed and pretty funny to boot.

I hadn’t heard of this film before despite its great pedigree, and if you fancy a bit of action and a few laughs you could do a lot worse than ‘Wasabi’.

Best Bit : Driving range fight


‘W’ Score 17/23

No.20 : Wanted : Dead Or Alive (1986)

Wanted : Dead or Alive at the IMDb

I thought I had fond memories of this 1986 Rutger Hauer action flick, but after a minute I realised that I’d confused it with the vastly superior ‘Night Hawks’. In ‘Night Hawks’ Hauer played the baddie terrorist being chase by Sylvester Stallone, in this he is the good guy chasing Gene Simmons out of Kiss. You do the math!

With only the lead character’s surname and profession retained from the western TV series of the same name which starred Steve McQueen, it beggars belief why they bought the rights. Well maybe they had them anyway, if so it’s a real waste of a decent premise. Rutger Hauer plays a cool bounty hunter who can take down red necks in bars as easy as pie. Things hot up when for no given reason, apart from being the baddies, a group of “rag heads” blow up a cinema showing ‘Rambo ‘ - merciful release you might say.

Rather than use the considerable resources of the LAPD and FBI Benson chooses to hire Rutger to save the day. Unbeknownst to Benson and Rutger the pen pushers at the office have set our man up to bait a trap that he narrowly escapes. After wasting a load of time following Rutger about, we enter endgame when the terrorists blow up his boat containing his girlfriend and best friend who was sent there as a decoy.

With only a call needed to get the terrorists’ address, Rutger is on the case and hopefully in time to stop a chemical plant attack and any more bad acting from Gene Simmons. After some laughable beat downs which include sliding a man in a wardrobe down some stairs, Rutger gets the plans and is at last on his way to the inevitable showdown.

This was a really dreadful 107 minutes. I like Rutger Hauer but as this movie proved he’s aces as a baddie and a charisma bypass as a hero. His ‘witty’ one liners are so obviously scripted that they might as well had the cue cards up on screen. The action sequences were pretty poor and the whole thing had a TV movie look about it.

Far too much of the film was spent on squabbles within the police department with precious little shown of the terrorist plot. Although this had the blessing of reducing Gene Simmons’ screen time it did look daft as the final act was shoe horned into the last ten minutes of an otherwise bloated run time.

I had no empathy at all for Rutger’s character and his emotional turmoil at the responsibility of killing the two people closest to him lasted about three frames.

You could argue in the current climate the film is as relevant now as ever but until we see gangs of Arabs running around shooting AK47’s in downtown LA I think it can stay shelved. Sadly the real terrorists have much more imagination than the writers of this cliché ridden, action free drivel.

Best Bit : “Fuck the bonus!”
‘W’ Score : 12/23