Review: Get Jiro! “Pilot” ; “Meat is Murder”
Overview
“Pilot”
In a futuristic LA, mysterious Outer Ring sushi chef Jiro sets off a violent chain of events after a customer violates his one rule: no soy sauce.
“Meat Is Murder”
Jiro is tasked with making a special delivery to an LA food festival, but must survive a gauntlet of bounty hunter food trucks along the way.
Our Take
Based on the DC Comics graphic novel co-written by the late Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose, Get Jiro! begins with two separate episodes introducing a bizarre, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where chefs have become the city’s ultimate authorities. Episode 1 introduces the titular Jiro (Brian Tee), a Japanese sushi chef who becomes caught between Bob (Titus Welliver) and Rose (Alison Pill), two rival culinary powerhouses whose operations function much like competing Mafia factions. After Jiro kills a chef named Monty, he is pulled deeper into their escalating conflict, while Episode 2 continues that story and fully commits to its absurd premise; the show’s completely straight-faced approach makes this strange combination of food, organized crime, and brutal violence surprisingly effective.
Jiro is essentially a culinary John Wick, capable of turning his knife or almost anything around him into a weapon, but his role in this conflict also brings Akira Kurosawa’s Samurai classic “Yojimbo” to mind. Like the wandering samurai at the center of Kurosawa’s aforementioned film, Jiro is an outsider who enters a power struggle between two opposing factions, neither of which he truly belongs to. Rather than simply becoming another soldier in their war, he follows his own code and makes his own decisions about who deserves his loyalty, particularly when innocent people like the Guerrero family are threatened. Brian Tee’s understated performance works well for this type of protagonist, while Bob and Rose are entertainingly different examples of chefs who run their territories like Mafia dons. The animation may occasionally feel stiff, but the cooking scenes and bloody action give the series plenty of visual personality.
Overall, these two opening episodes establish Get Jiro! as an unusual mixture of crime drama, culinary satire, and post-apocalyptic action. Its antagonistic forces functioning as Mafia-like culinary factions give the series a surprisingly familiar crime-thriller structure, while Jiro’s Yojimbo-inspired position between them adds another layer to his character. The show’s willingness to take its ridiculous world seriously allows the dark humor and violence to work, while Bourdain’s influence remains evident in its fascination with food and the culture surrounding it. It takes a little time for all the ingredients to come together, but once they do, Get Jiro! proves there’s considerably more to this bizarre culinary bloodbath than its premise initially suggests.
