When you’re as prolific as Takashi Miike, nobody expects them all to be winners. But surely, nobody would expect such a wild misfire as Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo to be stinking up the joint here at TIFF. A dull, neon-soaked nightmare and the poorest follow-up to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 classic, this taxing exercise is plagued with bad acting all across the board, including one that would be a career killer if it were to go viral. Uncharacteristically, Miike dials down the extreme violence while exploring Japan’s grimy underbelly, leaving even his most ardent supporters with nothing to look forward to.
Failing to fill the shoes of Harvey Keitel and Nicolas Cage before him, Shun Oguri gives a sleepy-eyed performance as the titular “bad lieutenant”, Yabuki. A hard-drinking, drug-using, gambling addict on the verge of losing his family, Yabuki often finds himself in a daze, waking up alone in a trashy alleyway, his feet in a dirty puddle of water. He’s been dreaming of a calming oasis of water deep in the woods, a reflection of his desires to wake up from the chaos that is his life. Imagine the iguanas that haunted Cage’s version, or the Christ-like visions seen by Keitel. But Yabuki is never that interesting of a character. Corrupt cops spiraling out of control is sort of what this unlikely franchise does best, and yet Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo can’t even manage to get that right.
The plot, or what passes for one, involves the Yakuza and the search for the killer of a crime boss’s son. There’s also the matter of the ex-Yakuza member recently released from prison who has begun murdering his loved ones and turning them into meatballs…literally, for the birds to eat. Yabuki is on the case, but he’s not alone. He’s got a partner, an American one, played by Hollywood actress Lily James.
I don’t know who suggested the demure, British Lily James for this role, she was attached even before Miike, but that casting agent needs a good talking to. James, doing her best to scowl and spit out her lines through gritted teeth, is the most unconvincing cowboy American cop stereotype put to screen since Chris Klein in The Legend of Chun-Li. She looks like she’s never held a cigarette in her life, much less smoked one. In the film’s one truly Miike-esque action scene in a club, James throws punches and kicks like someone afraid to break a nail. Oguri isn’t any better, and with much of the film sagging underneath the weight of its own dullness, it’s a scene that feels mandated by some producer who realized that nobody would ever pay to watch this.
For my fellow WWE fans eager to see superstar Liv Morgan in action…well, she’s definitely in the movie. That much I can tell you. Morgan is among my favorite WWE superstars and I hope better roles are there for her in the future. She does eat a lot of sushi and, at one point, has a brutal sex scene that some of her most fanatical supporters might get off to, but that’s about it.
There’s at least a little bit of fun to be had with Miike’s casting of the yakuza members. One of them, Jun Kunimura, played the poor, beheaded Boss Tanaka in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Miike knows his way around a solidly gritty gangster flick, and some of the film’s rare highlights is how Yabuki weaves in and out of danger from them, playing both sides of the law, stopping only to play ping-pong with a pair of young hookers who serve as the closest thing he’s got to actual friends.
The central characters in Bad Lieutenant are always seemingly irredeemable degenerates, broken men who maybe were good once, but were consumed by their own demons. We want to see them overcome it and be the heroes we know they could be. However, in Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, there’s not enough to Yabuki for us to care. Miike seems checked out and unable or unwilling to bring the eccentric, stylish violence that he’s known for, and if you don’t have that, then what’s the point. Maybe next time, they’ll try something different: Nice Guy Lieutenant: Portland. Anything to get as far away from this as possible.
