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The second re-imagining of “Bad Lieutenant” — Abel Ferrara’s 1992 neo-noir starring Harvey Keitel — Takashi Miike’s baffling “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo” borrows the broad strokes of the original, but tells its own Yakuza-centric story that never fully gets going. Its stop-start approach sees numerous characters and subplots introduced before existing ones can be resolved, or even commenced in earnest, yielding a paradoxically overstuffed sequel where little of note occurs.
Written by Daisuke Tengan, this loose remake opens with a block of onscreen text that fades too quickly for the human eye, before introducing the divorced, drug-addled detective Yabuki (Shun Oguri). After dropping his kids at school and snorting coke in full view of their friends — the only moment of hilarity in an otherwise bland retelling — Yabuki is called to a violent crime scene where a diminutive Yakuza member has been tied up in a sexual rendezvous gone awry, before having his neck turned nearly all the way around. The grisly diorama doesn’t faze Yabuki, and although he’s expected to offer expert testimony given his Yakuza-chasing past, he would rather let things lie. Instead, he offers a tip about the story to a bookie to clear some of his own gambling debts before going right back to baccarat.
In the pockets of unsavory people (some of them Yakuza bosses), Yabuki is soon pulled into a second series of killings, this time involving a gang member released from prison hacking his way through past associates, and turning their remains into meatballs — the only image here that provokes a visceral reaction. A little digging takes Yabuki to the suspected killer’s former orphanage, where he learns a tidbit about his past, only for the film to sweep all this aside in favor of several new detours which, although semi-connected, never fully cohere.
Running parallel to this butchery investigation is the arrival of perpetually hungover FBI agent Gwen Birgssen, played by British actress Lily James with an incomprehensible southern drawl and some clunky platitudes that veer into genre parody. Also beholden to major power players, Birgssen is in Japan searching for the wild-child daughter of an American politician, culinary student Megan (pro wrestler Gionna Daddio, credited by her WWE name Liv Morgan). After a chance meeting with Yabuki, she decides to enlist his help: At this point, it mercifully seems like the movie might finally kick off, only for it to stall for the umpteenth time.
First-act setups extend through the majority of the 108-minute runtime, constituting a plotless meander without the aesthetic allure to justify such a languid journey. Despite being set against the sprawl of Tokyo’s nightlife, the film feels severely limited in its use of time and place, and never crafts an atmosphere worthy of Miike’s previous work — one alluring or lurid enough to counterbalance its thematic and dramatic emptiness.
Apart from brief flashes Yabuki sees of a former partner he betrayed, there’s nothing really going on beneath the surface, as empty Japanese and American suits talk in circles about their opaque pasts. They don’t connect any major dots in either criminal case; both are solved by other people calling them with information. The occasional neon nightclub plays host to a skirmish here or there — the only major setpiece unfolds practically at random, completely disconnected from the plot — before Birgssen disappears for lengthy periods, leaving us to follow the passive Yabuki doing little of interest beyond borrowing money, visiting sex workers, and having repetitive interactions with low-level goons and the occasional mob boss.
Where Ferrara’s original and Werner Herzog’s 2009 version (“Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans”) shoved their violent lawmen towards spiritual agony, Miike only goes as far as cornering Yabuki within the frame a few times, before hitting the reset button yet again. By the time the film takes its first intriguing turn — some 15 minutes before the credits — it loses the time and the goodwill to have it mean much, beyond a puzzling series of loosely interconnected scenes that, at best, echo an underdeveloped idea of what a Japanese “Bad Lieutenant” might look like.
English (US) ·