Limit of Love: Umizaru (2006)

Director:

Eiichiro Hasumi

Writers:

Shuho Sato (comic)
Yasushi Fukuda (screenplay)

Release Date:

10 August 2006 (Singapore)

Genre:

Action | Drama

Plot Keywords:

Based On Comic

Cast

Hideaki Ito	...	Daisuke Senzaki
Ai Katô	...	Kanna Izawa
Ryûta Satô	...	Tetsuya Yoshioka
Nene Otsuka	...	Megumi Honma
Mitsuru Fukikoshi	...	Shinichi Ebihawa
Reina Asami	...	Shiori Otobe
Ryôsuke Miki	...	Sadayuki Katsuragi
Ken Ishiguro	...	Isamu Kitao
Saburô Tokitô	...	Iwao Shimokawa
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Munetaka Aoki	...	Masaya Watanabe
Tadahiro Aoki	...	Tadahiro Muto
YosiYosi Arakawa	...	Masahiko Hattori
Kazumi Arimi	...	Tadashi Ono
Mayumi Asaka	...	Utako Izawa
Koki Ebata	...	Setoguchi Shigeru
Tatsuya Fuji	...	Gentaro
Motoki Fukami	...	Makoto Tsuchiya
Katsutaka Furuhata	...	Yuta Yaegashi
Hiroshi Fuse	...	Shinichi Yabuki
Yusuke Hirayama	...	Takumi Yamaji
Masatô Ibu	...	Daisaku Higo
Shinpei Ichikawa	...	Tatsuro Yano
Kisuke Iida	...	Kenji Miike
Seiji Iinuma	...	Kohei Hayashi
Atsushi Itô	...	Hajime Kudo
Ken Kaito	...	Yuji Mishima
Karina	...	Erika Matsubara
Ryoko Kawase	...	Sayaka Tsuji
Katsumi Kiba	...	Tadashi Uchimura
Jun Kunimura	...	Masaki Igarashi
Kyoko	...	Natsuko Nakasako
Toru Masuoka	...	Shinpei Tsuda
Ken Mitsuishi	...	Shinji Nashimoto
Hiroki Miyake	...	Kenjiro Bessho
Taisei Miyamoto	...	Makoto Takei
Mitsuru Murata	...	Atsushi Kawaguchi
Tôru Nakamura	...	Masaki Ikezawa
Toru Nakane	...	Shinji Otomo
Isao Natsuyagi	...	Kotaro Katsuta
Kengo Ôkuchi	...	Kensuke Gunji
Kaoru Okunuki	...	Rieko Ono
Shin'ya Ôwada	...	Kazuya Mitamura
Kou Saito	...	Shinji Tadokoro
Akira Sakamoto	...	Daigo Iwamatsu
Makoto Sakamoto	...	Kota Nagashima
Yugo Sakamoto	...	Masaya Honmaru
Shinya Sano	...	Hibiki Nakahara
Hitomi Satô	...	Chika Mitsumori
Takuma Sugawara	...	Koichi Shigetomi
Kazuma Suzuki	...	Kosuke Fuyushiba
Sogen Tanaka	...	Eiji Nomura
Tetsushi Tanaka	...	Shigeru Bando
Kanji Tsuda	...	Keisuke Misawa
Asami Usuda	...	Rei Hoshino
Hisako Watanabe	...	Mari Kasai
Noriko Watanabe	...	Miyuki Sonobe
Miyoko Yoshimoto	...	Naoko Ikezawa

Also Known As:

Limit of Love: Sea Monkey (USA) (informal English title)
Umizaru 2: Test of Trust (Singapore: English title)

Runtime:

Japan:117 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Japan:PG-12 | Singapore:PG | Hong Kong:IIA

Filming Locations:

Hiroshima, Japan

Company:

Fuji Television Network

Movie Connections:

Follows Umizaru (2004)

A Nutshell Review: Umizaru 2: Test of Trust

Umizaru belongs to the kind of movies glorifying whichever the uniformed group under their spotlight. Those which I have enjoyed include the obvious US Navy pilots in Top Gun, the firefighters in Backdraft, and the Secret Service in In The Line of Fire. While those are Hollywood movies, Japan also had in 2004 made a movie about a rookie team of Coast Guards in Umizaru, and this follow up sequel brings back search and rescue diver Daisuke Senzaki (Hideaki Ito) and his team into what is probably another Poseidon like adventure.

Titled "Limit of Love", it's a strange moniker for a movie which is high on the action, and soppy on the romance. This movie continues the romantic relations between our hero Senzaki-san and his fiancée Kanna Izawa (Ai Katô), or rather the strained relations between the two after the former rejected the obvious hints of the latter to marry her, because of some strange personal reasons of skeletons from his closet which continued to haunt him. Brooding hero must exorcise these demons before he can commit to settling down, get it?

Therefore perhaps for similar reasons, we had it retitled as Test of Trust instead, as there are plenty of moments with reference to the title. In trusting your buddies to come back for you, in trusting the experts to do a job they are trained for, in trusting your fiancé to take care of himself and come back alive, the list goes on. But fret not even if you haven't watched the first movie, you'll be orientated soon enough to be in the thick of the action.

The filmmakers spared no expense in making this movie big, with planes, helicopters, ships, rafts, and tons of extras to make it a grand spectacle. Water-Underwater sequences are always never easy, and I dare say, given that this premise is similar to an earlier Hollywood stinker bore Poseidon, Umirazu 2 triumphs with its action sequences if they are compared side by side. It's not the special effects or the razzle dazzle (in which Poseidon wins hands down), but it's by its delivery. Keeping the cast and rescuees intimately small also helped in not having too many characters who can be brushed off easily as fodder, making them the regular, though clichéd, folks that you would actually care for.

If there is a gripe however, it'll be at how the melodrama gets drummed up into dizzying heights with plenty of lingering shots coupled with rousing crescendos from the soundtrack. While these are there probably for emphasis and dramatic effect, one can't help forget that in order for it to be a bit more believable, hey, it's a rescue operation! Cut the crap and the ra- ra talk, and just get on with saving lives or getting the hell out of whatever danger zones you are in!

I can't help but smile inside when certain scenes are shot in typical Japanese fashion with characters looking hard at each other and giving constant nods of assurances, especially in the control centre. Some things don't change do they? But all in all, this is a pretty interesting action movie, after a dearth of non-romance or horror movies from the land of the rising sun.