Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo
Written by Cameron Geiser
Warning: This review is for Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, which is a film presented at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. There may be slight spoilers present. Reader discretion is advised.
Image courtesy of the Toronto International film Festival.
Back in college my friends and I played the heck out of the video game No More Heroes, and in that game the characters often held court in between missions with conversations extolling the virtues of Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike. So, when I was skimming titles to cover for this year’s TIFF, my brain nearly seized when I saw that not only did Takashi Miike have a new film for TIFF this year, but it was a Bad Lieutenant film to boot! It was finally time to see what all the hubbub was about (I have no good reason for never looking the filmmaker up and watching his work until now, it was just one of those things that gets forgotten over the years).
Shun Oguri stars as our titular Bad Lieutenant, a detective working for Tokyo PD who tangled with the Yakuza in the past and that reputation has followed him ever since. Not only is he known for breaking the rules and getting too chummy with the unsavory parts of the underworld, he’s also a man with many problems. Gambling problems. Drug problems. Problems with his family at home. Debt problems. So many irons in the fire that he can barely keep up. That’s where he begins when he’s brought onto the crime scene of a brutally murdered Yakuza gang member. Things progress as our Detective’s family leaves town, he connects with old contacts as he hustles down ex-Yakuza and stirs up old beehives of less than reputable characters.
However things really speed up when he’s brought onto another crime scene where they suspect that the same killer is involved. When our lead knows that the victim was the wife of a recently released Yakuza gang member, he goes to track down the killer. Which is made that much more complicated when an American FBI agent (Lily James) arrives on the scene and demands to be partnered with the Detective in order to track down the daughter of the Speaker of the House who is on track to be picked for Vice President. Apparently she’d been in the country studying Sushi for weeks when she went off grid. Now in between all the gambling on dice and horse racing, psychedelic mind warping due to all the substance abuse and violence, he has to work with a stubbornly persistent FBI agent on multiple cases, all increasingly dangerous.
Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo is the epitome of cinematic “Cool”. It has everything a good action thriller in the police procedural sub-genre could ever require. Intense Shootouts. Fist fights and brawls. Double crossing, a diverse range of sexual escapades and drugs, all while Shun Oguri’s Detective maintains a keen sense of cynicism and ultimately, repaying those who have helped him. I can’t recommend this film enough, it was pure entertainment with boatloads of style all over the filmmaking. Takashi Miike has a new acolyte, I cannot wait to watch more of his work as this was pure joy.
Cameron Geiser is an avid consumer of films and books about filmmakers. He'll watch any film at least once, and can usually be spotted at the annual Traverse City Film Festival in Northern Michigan. He also writes about film over at www.spacecortezwrites.com.