Takashi Miike’s Iffy Franchise Entry

The first in a planned series of international sequels, Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo gets things off to a mostly inauspicious start, despite enlisting the magnetic Shun Oguri as the latest incarnation of the seedy, morally hollow detective to whom the films owe their title. It’s closer in terms of plot machinations to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 original with Harvey Keitel than to Werner Herzog’s wildly eccentric 2009 follow-up, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a snug fit for Nicolas Cage’s gonzo extremes. But that doesn’t mean the choppy narrative ever gathers much steam.

What’s surprising is that prolific Japanese cult director Takashi Miike, known for explosions of operatic violence, gore and perversion in breakthrough films like Auditon and Ichi the Killer, delivers a franchise entry that aspires to be a hardboiled crime thriller but lacks the electricity to build suspense or even tension. While devout Miike-heads might feel sated by the one or two amped-up set pieces and the characteristic strain of dark humor, this is by far the weakest of the three Bad Lieutenants.

The characters played by Keitel and Cage in previous installments both experienced a drug-fueled spiritual crisis. A cynical cop with a long history of investigating the yakuza underworld, Yabuki (Oguri) doesn’t appear to have much on his mind beyond feeding his meth habit, playing ping pong and doing drugs with a couple of giggly Korean sex-workers, and keeping the loan sharks at bay as he attempts to pay off — or recklessly increase — his gambling debts. He is occasionally troubled by guilt over his role in the death of a partner 15 years earlier, but those thoughts surface in surreal dream states rather than serious self-reflection.

Yabuki’s marriage is already in such a shambles that even his preteen kids are losing their faith in him. He scarcely blinks when he comes home and finds a note from his wife saying she has left with the children and telling him not to try to find them.

With the yakuza syndicates in a transitional state as old clans dissolve and new ones are formed deeper underground, his colleagues in law enforcement call on Yabuki’s expertise when a naked body turns up, an extensively tattooed young gangster whose neck has been neatly snapped. Yabuki recognizes the victim but withholds that information from the cops, instead using it to chip away at his debts.

While that investigation is ongoing, another spate of murders comes to light as Ishizuka (Shotaro Mamiya), a disenfranchised yakuza soldier fresh out of prison, wanders around town with a hefty machete delivering payback to anyone who betrayed him. He starts with his wife, chopping her up and then rolling her remains into meatballs, served up in planter boxes on the terrace for crows to feast on — inarguably the movie’s most quintessentially macabre Miike touch.

More criminal than cop in the eyes of many, including himself, Yabuki is an outsider at the precinct. But he hangs around long enough to be roped into assisting American FBI agent Gwen Birgssen (Lily James) in an investigation. Gwen has been dispatched to Tokyo to track down Megan (current Women’s World Champion WWE wrestler Liv Morgan), the missing daughter of a prominent U.S. congressman who came to Japan to study the art of sushi and got sidetracked by drugs and thugs. It later emerges that in addition to crack and raw bar cuisine, Megan has a thing for short dudes with impressive body ink.

It’s this thread more than anything that derails any plot momentum, partly because James is so woefully miscast, assuming an unconvincing Southern Fried drawl you might expect to find in a regional theater staging of Tennessee Williams. The Brit actress has obviously put in time on the fight training, demonstrating nimble moves in a nightclub brawl with no bearing on the plot. It does serve, however, to get both Gwen and Yabuki so sexually charged that they tumble into bed together. The old fight-and-f*ck combo never fails.

Miike appears to have minimal interest in dialogue-driven scenes. That’s too bad because Gwen and Yabuki have a few of them in which key information is possibly shared. Between James’ garbled twang, Oguri’s unsteady command of English (the actor fared better in that regard in Godzilla vs. Kong) and a muddy sound mix, much of their conversation is incomprehensible. Which might be for the best considering the increasingly bonkers twists of the script by Daisuke Tengan, who collaborated with Miike on Audition and the hit samurai epic, 13 Assassins.

The two investigations do eventually intersect of course, which happens when another slender tatted-up young gangster turns up dead and the victim’s father (Jun Kunimura, immortalized as Boss Tanaka in Kill Bill: Vol. 1) cuts Yabuki a deal to clear all his debts with the Chinese mob if the cop delivers the killer to him. The inevitable bloodbath happens, along with lots more meatballs for the hungry crows and revelations about how Megan gets her freak on. But the cases are resolved too haphazardly to make us care much, especially when it involves Gwen, the least persuasive gunslinger in the history of movies, snarling “Motherfucker” as she plugs a mobster full of lead.

Like much of Miike’s work, the visuals are equal parts slick and rough-edged, and the Shinjuku setting, specifically the red-light Kabukicho district with its warren of back alleys, bars and brothels, supplies plenty of shadowy atmosphere, often stained with neon. But the movie is way too busy to keep all its plates spinning and if not for the fact that Oguri is so watchable with his mop of unruly hair and sleepy deadpan delivery, there would be very little here to recommend. But Miike fans might even give Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo a stamp of approval just for one scene of major mayhem, in which Yabuki does some virtuoso driving, plowing through yakuza scum while protecting the lives of … a bunch of cute kids? Don’t even ask.