Whussup with Wasabi?

>> Luc Besson subcontracts another lukewarm action/comedy


by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Fans of French director/producer Luc Besson, the man behind such stylish hits as The Big Blue and Nikita, have a double dose of his product to choose from right now. The two films, Yamakasi and Wasabi (both of which Besson wrote and produced, but couldn’t be bothered to direct) mirror each other. Yamakasi brings Asian acro-battle to the arrondissements of Paris, while Wasabi deposits Besson regular Jean Reno on the streets of Tokyo.

In Wasabi, Reno plays Hubert, a hulking French cop whose long arm of the law ends in a frequently employed fist. When Reno is informed that his Japanese lost love from two decades before has passed away, his boss urges him to go smash faces in Japan instead.
Once there, he visits the lawyer for a reading of—oh, no, wait. First he smashes some guy’s face. Then he sees the lawyer about the will, and is handed responsibility for Yumi, the 19-year-old daughter-he-never-knew-he-had, played with excruciating verve by Japanese pop princess Ryoko Hirosue. Turns out mom was tangled up in some dirty business and left $200-million squirrelled away for Reno—and a few nasty yakuzas—to worry about. Let the fisticuffs and ballistics begin!

Actually, the action’s rather limited in Wasabi, a surprise given that the director, Gérard Krawczyk, also helmed the explosive, adrenalized Taxi 2 (ask your next cabbie, he’ll tell you). There’s maybe a couple of fights and no car chases to speak of. This does, however, leave room for Reno the comic cut-up (over in Frawnce, there, he’s more a laff-getter than a tough guy) to strut his stuff. He plays particularly well off of Michel Muller, a classic, lovable schlub who plays Hubert’s colleague Momo.

Like Yamakasi and last year’s Kiss of the Dragon, Wasabi shows that Besson’s infatuation with the fusion of Asian action and French je-ne-sais-quoi fails to satisfy. The Taxi movies rocked, no question, but maybe it’s time Luc got back behind the camera and stopped farming half-baked ideas out to his underlings. :

Wasabi opens Friday, Jan. 25