‘Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo’ Review: Takashi Miike Can’t Elevate an Uneven Entry Into an Unlikely Franchise

TIFF: The Japanese genre legend brings some, but not enough, of his signature style to this yakuza neo-noir.

Japan is famous for its clean streets, and rightfully so: On the whole, Tokyo is far less dirty than you might expect from a mega-metropolis of its size. But it does have its squalid pockets, like the infamous square in the heart of Shinjuku’s Kabukicho vice district that’s home to the “Tōyoko kids” in Matoko Nagahisa’s “Burn.” Lieutenant Yabuki (Shun Oguri), the compromised antihero of Takashi Miike’s “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo,” is a denizen of those same streets. He wanders them late at night, drunk and high, and occasionally finds himself waking up hours later in an alley surrounded by trash, staring down into a puddle he was just hallucinating as a cooling, verdant oasis.

This is Yabuki’s equivalent of Harvey Keitel’s visions of Christ in the original “Bad Lieutenant,” or the iguanas that torment Nicolas Cage in “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.” Each of these phantoms is meant to represent something about our corrupt policemen’s druggy, fractured psyche; here, it’s the concept of respite, the desire to climb down off of the wheel of karma and escape the hellish downward spiral that’s led Yabuki into his depraved double life. And although this is very much a “Bad Lieutenant” movie, the Buddhist influence on Yabuki’s subconscious is one of the ways that Miike and screenwriter Daisuke Tengan — who also penned “13 Assassins” and “Audition” for the prolific genre legend — tailor the concept for Japanese sensibilities.

Another is a nod to the corporatization of the yakuza. At one point, a character claims that these underworld organizations disappeared in the early ‘00s following an intense police crackdown, which is only true in the sense that a stereotypical Italian-American mobster might say they’re in the “sanitation business.” Miike and Tengan seem nostalgic for the less respectable old days, making references to ‘70s “Toei flicks” like “Battles Without Honor and Humanity” and casting tough-guy character actors like Jun Kunimura — probably best known to Western audiences as Boss Tanaka, the yakuza who get beheaded by O-Ren Ishii in “Kill Bill: Vol 1” — and famous Japanese TV cop Hiroshi Tachi in minor roles.

Fans of old-school Japanese gangster movies will find at least temporary satisfaction from these portions of the film, in which Lieutenant Yabuki plays double agent by feeding the yakuza information about a grotesque murder case on which he’s serving as a forensic consultant. Oguri carries these sequences with ease, smoking meth and playing ping-pong with Korean sex workers until it’s time to pick up the kids and take them to work in the morning. In this way, “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo” succeeds, both as an underworld murder mystery and as a continuation of this unlikely franchise. Then the Americans come in.

Midway through the film, Yabuki is called into a meeting with FBI agent Gwen Birgssen (Lily James), who’s in the city investigating a mystery of her own. She’s trying to locate Megan (WWE wrestler Liv Morgan), the wild-child daughter of an American politician who’s disappeared into the twilight of the Tokyo underworld. The young woman’s tastes run towards high-end sushi restaurants, heavily tattooed men, and “sucking on a crack pipe,” as Gwen puts it. And, as one might expect from such a description, a series of fractured vignettes that reveal, piece by piece, how dangerous Megan actually is mark a shift into the gonzo ultraviolence that’s defined Miike’s career abroad. But even as it commingles violent, the carnal, and the outrageously gory, “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo” is never as kinetic, or as exhilaratingly transgressive, as the “VIsitor Q” director’s best and most notorious work.

Instead, the plot devolves into a messy, repetitive blur of grotesque hedonism. The multiple storylines do eventually come together, but by the time that happens, not even the movie seems to care that much about their outcome. The changing gears also introduce perhaps the film’s most misguided element, as James puts on a cringeworthy accent in a hard-boiled imitation of Jodie Foster in “Silence of the Lambs.” Both the performance and the character arc are ill-conceived from the jump: Gwen’s torrid backstory is one too many subplots for the movie to bear, and while Miike has made movies with English dialogue before — his “Masters of Horror” episode “Imprint,” later released as a standalone film, featured Japanese actors speaking phonetic English— one possible explanation for what’s going on here is that he may not be familiar enough with the subtleties of American regional accents to prevent a British actor from embarrassing themselves with an inconsistent one.

James was already attached to the project when Miike was approached to direct it, so maybe this is also just a case of everyone trying to make what they have work in the best way that they can. Unfortunately, however, although it’s not without its seedy charms, conflicting loyalties — the producers to star power potent enough to sustain this unlikely franchise into a third installment, and the writer and director to their own eccentric sensibilities — make “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo” a cross-cultural mashup that just doesn’t come together like it should.

Grade: C+

“Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Neon will release the film domestically at a later date.