Takashi Miike took to the stage at the world premiere of his new film Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo like a rock star. “I’m Miike” he roared. “I’m back!” Which is immediately funny, because he’s never, ever really been away; arguably the hardest working man in showbusiness, Miike is never very far from a movie camera. Produced by the late British producer Jeremy Thomas — who formed a very fruitful alliance with the Japanese auteur, starting with 13 Assassins in 2020 — the latest in the Bad Lieutenant franchise is arguably the lightest of the three. It’s violent for sure, but Miike goes easy on the gore, giving free rein to his expressive, hangdog star to mine the story’s rich, deep seam of jet-black humor.
The first Bad Lieutenant (1992) was definitely an Abel Ferrara joint, the last in a long run of sleazy, gritty New York-centric dramas that he began with 1979’s Driller Killer. Ferrara’s bad cop, played by Harvey Keitel, was anything but fun, an oversight corrected by Werner Herzog in the outrageous Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), featuring Nicolas Cage at his OTT best. Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo sits somewhere in the middle, being somehow the least extreme of the three, which is a turn-up for the books when you consider that Miike made the ultra-violent yakuza movie Ichi the Killer (2001).
Miike has pretty much factored in your awareness of the Bad Lieutenant series and doesn’t spend too much time exploring how this particular lieutenant got to be so bad; he just is. About to be divorced, by a wife who has taken his two kids with her, Lieutenant Yabuki (Shun Oguri) has a dozen rackets running all at once, taking kickbacks from the mob and spending most of the proceeds on drugs, hookers and gambling (the rest he wastes). There’s clearly a slim shred of a conscience, since, in the film’s opening scenes, he shows up, bleary-eyed, to take his kids to school, but Yabuki’s colleagues are wary of him, not least because his last partner came to a very sticky end some 15 years prior.
Yabuki, then, is on the way out, but what keeps him there is his knowledge of the Seiryu-kai, a real-life yakuza gang that dominated the Japanese crime scene until relatively recently. But when a series of tattooed gangsters start turning up dead, tied up BDSM-style with their necks broken, Yabuki is the man to call (“We could use his expertise”). At the same time, Ishizuka (Shotaro Mamiya), a recently freed member of the Seiryu-kai, is out looking for revenge on the people who wronged him, starting with his estranged wife. In classic Miike style, the poor woman is chopped into tiny little bits (off-screen) and her flesh moulded into meatballs, which Ishizuka leaves outside for the crows (a “sky burial”, Yabuki calls it).
Roughly half an hour in, Yabuki meets Gwen (Lily James), an FBI agent on a classified assignment to look for the missing daughter of a high-ranking politician and potential Vice-President of the United States. Gwen has a dark secret, a mission that went badly wrong, and the job is more of a gun to the head than a chance to make good. If she finds the girl, she can wipe the slate clean and “get my life back”; if not, then her career is over. Seeing a kindred spirit beneath the all-American veneer, Yabuki joins forces with her. The pair even have sex (“How does it feel to be f*cked by a scumbag?” asks Yabuki).
The search for the missing girl brings a surprise Basic Instinct-style erotic-thriller element to the usual formula, which seems extraneous at first but later turns out to integral to Yabuki’s downfall (the pre-ordained fate of the bad lieutenant is always baked in and non-negotiable). For all his badness, however, Yabuki is really quite charming, and part of his appeal is not so much that he’s completely amoral with his hedonism, it’s that he no longer cares any more.
Shun Oguri fits the part perfectly, like Columbo on meth, but sadly, the same can’t really be said of Lily James, who doesn’t quite have the girl-boss sass the role requires, even though she does, literally, kick ass in a terrific bar-room brawl. Some of this is down to the sequences in English; Oguri’s accent is sometimes hard to make out, which isn’t helped by the low sound mix and Miike’s tendency in dialogue scenes to show a reverse shot of the person not talking.
The film’s limited resources become a little more obvious towards the end, but Miike wears his low-budget bona fides with pride, and the lo-fi production values only add to the grittiness of its urban setting. In short, this is classic Miike, not at his most shocking but certainly as slick as he’s ever going to get. It’s also a reminder that Miike makes good movies with the same speed that he makes bad ones; in fact, he probably finished the next one while you were reading this and is likely starting on another one right now. Whatever it is, he’ll be back soon enough.
Title: Bad Lieutenant: TokyoFestival: Toronto (Special Presentations)Director: Takashi MiikeScreenwriter: Daisuke TenganCast: Shun Oguri, Lily James, Shotaro Mamiya, Liv Morgan, Jun Kunimura, Hiroshi TachiDistributor: NeonRunning time: 1 hr 48 mins
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