THE STORY – A corrupt gambler in the Metropolitan Police Force finds himself thrown into a tangled case after an enigmatic FBI agent arrives in Tokyo to investigate the disappearance of a politician’s daughter.
THE CAST – Shun Oguri, Lily James, Shotaro Mamiya, Liv Morgan, Jun Kunimura & Hiroshi Tachi
THE TEAM – Takashi Miike (Director) & Daisuke Tengan (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 108 Minutes
It’s doubtful Abel Ferrara, when he made “Bad Lieutenant” back in the nineties, expected the film to have the following it has today, let alone lead to multiple sequels. If anything, the series has become a platform for some of cinema’s most distinctive artists to offer their own perspective on man’s immorality through a down-and-dirty police protagonist at the center of the story who’s the supposed embodiment of everything society is supposed to stand for. Now fifteen years after Werner Herzog’s iteration, prolific Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Miike comes into the fold with “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo,” the series’ first international entry. Japan fits right in with New York and New Orleans as a city brimming with a dazzling variety of locations, all with a scuzzy underbelly sour enough to thrust the titular bad lieutenant into the worst of temptations. That potential is realized at times by Miike, but for what’s come before, or even in comparison to some of his previous work, “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo” simply doesn’t meet the mark one would hope for.
Miike’s entry follows degenerate Tokyo metropolitan police officer Kyoji Yabuki, played by Shun Oguri. Like other versions, Yabuki is no saint, drinking, fornicating, gambling, and drugging himself mindlessly to get through each shift. He’s abandoned his duties as a family man all while racking up debts from some of Tokyo’s most dangerous criminals. The badge he wields isn’t one of honor, but a pass that enables his worst behavior. When Yabuki isn’t trying to find ways to squander his repayments to loan sharks, he’s working a case to hunt down Shotaro Mamiya’s Ishizuka, a meth-addicted former Yakuza member who’s resurfaced to settle a blood debt. The case garners a large amount of attention from the police as bodies keep dropping. The Yakuza are at least in the public eye; they are outlawed, now operating in the shadows. In this portion of “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo,” Miike hits a stride, blending fantastical elements with full-blown bodily mayhem caused by Ishizuka.
The film gets messy when Daisuke Tengan’s screenplay throws Lily James’s Gwen into the mix. Gwen is an FBI agent tasked with bringing back Liv Morgan’s Megan, a sushi love nepo baby with ties to power brokers in Washington. Gwen’s presence mainly shows that her character is cut from the same cloth as Yabuki, with audiences being teased by the yet-to-be-revealed indiscretions that saddled her with the task of getting Megan back home. Megan’s sinister outings in Japan somehow seem more over-the-top than the bucket-wielding Ishizuka, who turns his victims into human meatballs, as these two separate cases fight for Miike’s and the audience’s focus. It’s almost like there are two separate films baked into this screenplay, and Miike’s inability to give each not only time to breathe but to integrate with the other more naturally leads to mixed results.
Miike sticks far more closely to making the film a procedural with his take on the series. The neo-noir aspects are still present, often derailing the more introspective moments where Yabuki sits reflecting on the living ghosts that haunt his life. Where “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo” differs from its predecessors is that, despite how much of a degenerate Yabuki is, he’s honestly far less deplorable than either Keitel’s or Cage’s version. More apparent goodness comes into full display by the finale of the film. Oguri also never plays up the performance to an absurdly heightened level, strolling the streets of Tokyo strung out, looking like the most Spike Spiegel-looking human on the planet. Oguri’s performance is always enjoyable, as his dejected reactions to a bet or a sideways turn in his investigation play into Miike’s sickly sense of humor. He never has a moment here that rivals a sequence like the famous Keitel naked drunken serenade in Ferrara’s version. At least he’s far more in the vein of Miike’s wavelength than James, who feels miscast, waltzing in with a hilariously thick Southern accent. Her presence adds nothing to the film besides being a one-note obstacle that provides context for Yabuki’s actions and occasionally sexually charged conversations.
Miike’s direction is solid, but nothing here stands out, as everything pales in comparison to other pictures he’s made. “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo” is far tamer than one would expect, not just for a film in this series but also of Miike’s filmography. Even when it gets wild, it feels too safe, never fully embracing the sleazy underworld the narrative takes place in. Miike rounds out what is one of cinema’s most disorienting trilogies, making you wonder whether its appeal has long since expired.
