The Guardian ·
Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo review – Takashi Miike follows Ferrara and Herzog with a disappointment
There’s a surprisingly tame quality to the gorehound’s contribution to the rough and ready franchise and a general aimlessness that frustrates
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.