MOVIE REVIEW

By Manohla Dargis, Times Staff Writer

The flaccid new French action film "Wasabi" is the cinematic equivalent of one of those tourist T-shirts your parents bring back from vacation--you know, they get to go to Tokyo and you get this stupid movie. Quite a few people were lucky enough to travel to Japan for the making of this film, including its screenwriter and prolific producer Luc Besson, who's best known here as the director of such gleefully corrupt entertainments as "La Femme Nikita" and "The Fifth Element." Besson isn't a talent who generally finds favor with critics, but his movies are often too silly to cause serious offense. They're glib and derivative, stuffed with big bangs and trend-toting waifs, but at their most watchable they shimmy with the sort of propulsive mayhem that can briefly obscure the most threadbare of plots.

A number of Besson's better follies have starred Jean Reno, whose hangdog visage speaks eloquently to the French indignity at having to share the world with other people. Reno is usually a pleasant addition to any story, but even his knockabout bonhomie wears thin in a vacuum. In "Wasabi," Reno stars as Hubert, a bruiser of a Parisian cop famous for knocking suspects and innocents flat with his fists. On the very day that he's forced on administrative leave, Hubert learns that his long-lost girlfriend has died, a woman he hasn't seen in about 20 years. Summoned to Japan, he discovers that his former lover has left him in charge of a metal key, a fat bank account and an annoying daughter, Yumi (Ryoko Hirosue), a screeching 19-year-old whose grief at her mother's death is as fleeting and unpersuasive as her charm.

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You don't have to be a math whiz to guess the rest--one hint is Yumi's epic nose--which for all the glimpses of firepower primarily consists of Tokyo tourist shots, some cheap innuendo about incest and far too much of Hubert's mugging sidekick, Maurice (Michel Muller). Directed by Gérard Krawczyk, who previously made Besson's "Taxi 2," "Wasabi" dawdles and drags when it should pop; it doesn't even have the virtue of enough mindless violence to break up the tedium of all its generational bonding. By the time some bad guys in suits and dark glasses make the scene about 50 minutes into the story, Hubert and Yumi are clothes shopping (yes, clothes shopping) to the thump of the drum and bass beat. The only problem is that you don't want Hubert to dispatch the yakuza too easily, because if he did all that would remain of this rubbish is more French comedy and a Japanese monster the size of a poodle.

MPAA rating: R, for some violence. Times guidelines: cartoon violence and gunplay.

'Wasabi'
Jean Reno...Hubert
Michel Muller...Maurice
Ryoko Hirosue...Yumi

A Europa Corp. production, in cooperation with Samitose and TF1 Films and with Canal+, released by Columbia Tristar. Director Gérard Krawczyk. Screenwriter and producer Luc Besson. Cinematographer Gérard Sterin. Editor Yann Hervé. Production designer Jacques Bufnoir. Production designer, Japan, Jean-Jacques Gernolle. Running time: 2 hours, 14 minutes. In French and Japanese with English subtitles.

Exclusively at Laemmle's Pasadena Playhouse, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500; and Landmark's Westside Pavilion Cinemas, 10800 Pico Blvd., (310) 475-0202.