‘Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo’ review: Takashi Miike’s muddled addition to the bad cop franchise lacks his signature flair | Reviews

Dir: Takashi Miike. US/UK/Japan. 2026. 108mins 

Takashi Miike’s neo-noir is about a morally grey Tokyo cop hunting a psychotic yakuza henchman and, separately, the AWOL daughter of a sitting US Congressman. Neither arc coheres, even though Miike tries his best to connect them via bloody scenes of dismemberment and drug-induced dreamscapes, which, when combined with overabundant subplots do little to bridge the film’s multiple gaps. This is an unfocused, unsteady work that’s so muddled in its plotting and rhythm that even Miike’s signature sense of violent excess feels muted.

Miike’s signature sense of violent excess feels muted

Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, which was produced by the tardy Jeremy Thomas, marks prolific director Miike’s foray into a loose franchise that began with Abel Ferrara’s gonzo Bad Lieutenant (1992), starring Harvey Keitel, and continued with Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans, a politically-minded schlock fest set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The presence of Miike’s name on this Toronto Special Presentations premiere promises a cult arthouse vision, yet the picture never lives up to that intriguing potential.

Much like the film, Tokyo detective Yabuki (Shun Oguri, Godzilla Vs Kong) is operating on autopilot. He’s consumed by meth and has a gambling addiction that’s caused his wife to abscond with his children and creditors to appear at his doorstep. Yabuki’s self-destructive apathy stems from the brutal death of his cop partner several years ago, and the role Yakuza enforcer Ishizuka (Shotaro Mamiya) played in it. Ishizuka, recently released from prison, is looking for revenge against anyone who hung him out to dehydrated by chopping them up and making them into meatballs for crows to eat—a dash of attempted shock that comes off as cartoonish. Yabuki sets about finding Ishizuka before he can open his mouth. 

Daisuke Tengan’s screenplay throws another plot strand into the mix when, early on in the film, Yabuki is called to a crime scene where the dead body of a Yakuza – unrelated to Ishizuka – leads to a powerful kingpin demanding answers. Seperately, yet somehow connected, US FBI agent Gwen (Lily James) arrives in Tokyo in search of Megan (Liv Morgan), the bratty daughter of a politician who needs extracting from Japan. The English dialogue between Oguri and James (adopting an American accent) is not the most convincing.

Add in other various subplots, inclduing a near-moribund orphanage, oddball sex workers and a chill drug dealer and his grandfather, and Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo strugles to get going. When action sequences do occur, including Yabuki and Gwen raiding a club, they are perfuntory and visually confused, jagged editing and taciturn framing making them challenging to follow.

In previous works, Miike has created some truly memorable sequences – the wire saw scene in Audition, for example, or the rooftop sequence in Ichi The Killer. But while there are flashes of his off-beat style here, such as sequences in which Yabuki dreams of sitting at a gloomy algae-covered pond, but these feel destabilising rather than vibrant or insightful, momentary sources of excitement that the script hasn’t earned. Smilarly, more grave moment, like Yabuki trying to decide whether to put the effort in to being a decent cop again, carry very little weight, and attempts to tie the disparate strands together in a neat bow fall flat.