Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo Review (TIFF 2026)
If there’s one throughline across my TIFF coverage, it’s the fact that my relationship with film isn’t quite as strong as I’d like to hope.
Well, my relationship with Takashi Miike is in that same boat. His only other film I’ve seen is his adaptation of Ace Attorney (which I love, alongside loving the game a lot)! Similarly, I haven’t seen the original Bad Lieutenant (dir. Abel Ferrara) or Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (dir. Werner Herzog), so Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo for me is, in a lot of ways, just a straight up fresh encounter with both Miike-san as well as Bad Lieutenant.
Even then, I fucked with this a lot. I love noir as a genre, and this hit all those boxes. Old detective whose screwed up his life trying for one last score, the new partner who also has a screwed up life, and a city that feels cursed, where the rot keeps trying to claw its way through.
Shun Oguri is so fun as the titular Bad Lieutenant, Kyoji Yabuki. He’s messed up, his debts are catching up to him, he’s morally reprehensible, giving up so much left and right just to continue funding a gambling addiction. Lily James as the FBI Agent who comes to Tokyo to hunt down a politician’s daughter (Liv Morgan) is given direction that almost goes to parody – she’s got her own dark past, and a strong southern accent, but it works for me given the absurdity of everything else.
The action in this film rocks so hard. I’m not that familiar with Miike’s work so I’m not sure how he does it otherwise, but it’s so kinetic and slick here. There’s a scene where two characters get horny off the violence, it’s incredible. It also just looks stunning all the time, although I would’ve liked to spend more time in the neon rain-drenched streets of Tokyo.
Narratively, I want to go back to Ace Attorney here. That’s a movie that feels like it’s a television series crammed into a feature length film, but Miike made it work there. In Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, the film switches between Plot A and Plot B before they converge at the very end, and the pacing there is also like that of Ace Attorney – almost breakneck with how much is happening, and yet it just works, it’s amazing.
Very much a “made for me” film, almost reminded me of reading a Frank Miller comic at times. Excited to dive into more of Miike-san’s work.
