Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo – first-look review

All lieutenants are bad, to paraphrase a famous axiom, and that includes officers on every police force, everywhere – at least, this is the premise of the Bad Lieutenant films. Not a franchise, not an original film and its remakes, but rather a secret, third thing, Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant, with Harvey Keitel; Werner Herzog’s 2009 Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and now Takashi Miike’s Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, with Shun Oguri, are more like variations on a theme. In all three films, a corrupt and guilt-stricken cop, plagued by his demons and intoxicated by his state-supplied power and many other substances besides, weathers the twin crucibles of a gruesome homicide investigation and personal crisis, in a parable of sin and redemption set in the underbelly of the city he calls home, and coloured by the pathologies of each film’s singular auteur. 

After the Catholic passion and addiction compulsions of Ferrara and Keitel’s fable of a pre-gentrified New York City, and freak-matched Herzog and Cage’s gonzo post-Katrina outing, Miike’s new British-Japanese coproduction seems comparatively tame. Its outré violence merely de rigueur from the director of Audition and Ichi the Killer, and none of the film’s performances carry the touch of real madness.

This time around, the titular bad lieutenant: Tokyo is Yabuki (Oguri), who used to investigate the yakuza, in a chequered career marred by the death of his partner under mysterious circumstances, the emotional fallout of which has left the sleep-deprived Yabuki losing touch with his family, snorting and shooting methamphetamine to stay awake, whiling away his hours at a Shinjuku dive, blowing all his money on games of chance, and shirking the many shady, sharking creditors looking to collect on his mounting debts.

A crackdown has seen the yakuza go underground, but their distinctive tattoos are still everywhere in evidence – including on the torso of a mutilated murder victim, the first in a series of two intertwined serial killing sprees. The other, himself a former low-level yakuza and fellow meth addict, attacks his victims with a meat cleaver and then breaks their bodies down into meatballs, leaving them out as a feast for the crows. At least one of these killings is related to the presence, in Tokyo, of the runaway daughter (Liv Morgan) of a prominent American politician, who seems to be real bad news and has occasioned the arrival of an FBI agent (Lily James) soon partnered with the reluctant Yabuki.

Following in the footsteps of the dangerous, self-destructive Keitel and the ecstatic, adrenal Cage, Ogui is weary and nihilistic in a role framed by the flashback-laden script as more haunted than manic. He does rouse a chuckle in a sequence that sees Yabuki step into a preschool father-and-child dance performance in exchange for a blowjob. James affects an intermittently southern ballbusting accent along with grim facial expressions and hardly sufficiently strident body language – she’s smaller than life, in what should be a camp turn as the steely, damaged American abroad.

The brightest spark of perversity comes from pro wrestler Morgan, who fixes her sociopathic gaze on a piece of sushi and conveys across as both exultant and dead-on-the-inside during rough sex that shades into carnage. It’s the movie’s most unhinged performance performance in its most outlandish role, but Miike and screenwriter Daisuke Tengan can’t come up with enough interesting stuff for her to do – when her presence is required in Act Three to wrap things up, she simply pops up in a nightclub, passed out on the floor.

Miike is a director of almost superhuman productivity who churns through genre setups with a first-thought-best-thought directness and uncensored id, but Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo is a quite straightforward policier in a grim, often staid register. The many deaths in the film are gross but not, by his standards, particularly explicit until a late car chase-cum-shootout, in which the characters chase after death with headlong kamikaze energy that proves contagious – Miike finds a novel way to arrange a character’s decapitation.

The impetus to mint more, badder lieutenants in an unending auteur-friendly globetrotting series came from prominent creative producer Ed Pressman and his son Sam; Pressman pere died in 2023 and this first instalment carries a dedication to Sam Pressman’s coproducer, the recently deceased visionary impresario Jeremy Thomas, known for making space for hugely risky films by the likes of Cronenberg, Skolimowski, and Bertolucci.

The Bad Lieutenant project as a whole, should Sam Pressman continue it past this film, is a more fitting tribute to Thomas than Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo itself. If Miike hardly seems to have hit top speed in this latest tale of garish lighting, Tokyo lowlife and the old ultraviolence, then, well, there’s always tomorrow, and maybe the next lieutenant will be worse.