Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Hubert is a French policeman with very sharp methods. After being forced to take 2 months off by his boss, who doesn't share his view on working methods, he goes back to Japan, where he used to work 19 years ago, to settle the probate of his girlfriend who left him shortly after marriage without a trace.
Wasabi is a breezy French-Japanese action-comedy directed by Gérard Krawczyk and produced by Luc Besson, starring Jean Reno as the gruff cop Hubert. The plot is serviceable genre fare — a fish-out-of-water cop discovering he has a teenage daughter and getting entangled with the Yakuza — competently executed but not particularly deep or surprising. Jean Reno is reliably charismatic and carries the film with his deadpan physicality, while Ryoko Hirosue brings energetic charm as his daughter, though the overall acting is functional rather than exceptional. Visually it's a polished mid-budget Europacorp production with some fun Tokyo location work but nothing cinematographically distinctive. The film has a certain light, unpretentious fun in blending French cop-movie conventions with Japanese culture, giving it mild novelty as a cross-cultural oddity, but it's ultimately a formulaic Besson-factory action-comedy. The ending wraps things up efficiently but feels rushed and emotionally thin, failing to capitalize on the father-daughter relationship built throughout.