Abel Ferrera’s Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel as the eponymous coke-addled cop stumbling into crime scenes and contributing to the injustices, felt like it had us rooting around the mouldy and corroded interior of a back-alley dumpster, searching for a soul. A Takashi Miike adaptation seemed an appealingly foul idea. The maestro behind Audition and Ichi The Killer is known for punishing audiences with J-horror violence but with a formal elegance that we couldn’t look away from. His Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo should have been the perfect marriage of moral degradation and corporal desecrations.
The movie lives up to its promise when those extremes are giddily on the same page. But more often than not Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo is a confounding and frustrating mess, a smorgasbord of good ideas (and some bad ones) at odds with each other, barely held together by Shun Oguri’s wily performance.
The latter shines even if his character and performance is often derivative of Keitel’s, as if he’s importing the OG Bad Lieutenant to the scuzzy, claustrophobic environs in Tokyo that Miike prefers. Oguri’s meth-head, gambling addict Lieutenant Yabuki is often lurking in scuzzy basements, dimly-lit baccarat halls or back-alleys where all the trash from the clean streets of Tokyo, and just glimmers of the neon lights, seem to end up. Unlike the nervous and often chaotic handheld camera work in Ferrera’s original, Miike frames these scenes as he does his violence, in steady, lovely and stylish frames.
Yabuki moves slow, his head hanging heavy, until he takes a hit of meth or makes a bad bet with borrowed money, when he explodes into a feral performance of full body jerks and facial contortions echoing Nicolas Cage’s tics in the previous adaptation, Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans.
Yabuki is comical and captivating in early scenes. He keeps a warm rapport with a pair of sex workers, who are wowed by his ability to perform with the medley of poisons sweating from his pores. He turns up like a delicate nuisance asking favours of a young drug dealer taking commands from his generous grandpa, who is cutting meth in the back. He’s taken aback by his young children who warn him on the drive to school to not fall asleep at the wheel and be nice to mom. They clock exactly who he is, and manage to keep smiling through, as if desperately hopeful that their dad can be better. He has no words. And we never see them again. So far, so good, as far as a distinct take on this particular brand of character study.
A series of grisly murder drags Yabuki away from his lifestyle, but perhaps back to his past with the Yakuza. Victims have their heads pulverized or beheaded, some whose flesh is pounded into minced meet for the crows to feed on. As nasty as that sounds, the violence here is relatively tamped down for Miike, a concession perhaps for a wider North American audience.
The more calculated and fatal concession on that front is Lily James’s FBI agent, a character left to flail around awkwardly between the cross-continental collaboration that is the Bad Lieutenant franchise and Miike. James, a fine British-actor overdoing a long drawl American accent as caricature perhaps for Japanese audiences, is at a loss opposite Oguri, who mouths the sounds of English words while refusing to acknowledge a language barrier.
James’s Gwen Birgssen is airdropped into Tokyo on a mission to retrieve a politician’s nepo baby daughter. The latter, Megan, played by wrestler, Liv Morgan, has been caught partaking in crack while travelling in Tokyo to study sushi. Megan risks becoming a national embarrassment. Given what Morgan, as a performer with mean shoulders, is capable of, Megan’s an even bigger threat, but I won’t spoil that. Let’s just say she’s more at home in Miike’s world than Gwen, whose subplot is squeezed in as if directed by stakeholder memo. The narrative contorts even harder than some of the bludgeoned bodies on display to make it work, before ultimately falling apart.
As unhinged or gonzo as the previous Bad Lieutenant movies were, even with a performance as hyperactive and erratic as Cage’s, they always felt cohesive, the chaos orchestrated by Ferrara and Herzog anchored to their leads.
When Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo is dragged off the rails, Shun Oguri at least keeps it amusing. There’s small pleasures in watching Yabuki grow more hilariously exasperated in the presence of characters, and a movie, more fucked up than he is, as if they’re all the Bad Lieutenant’s style.
Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo is premiering at the Toronto film festival and will open later this year
