Review of the TV series "TTokyo Vice" - a neo-noir about the confrontation between a reporter and the Yakuza
A crime drama left without the attention it deserves, after which you'll want to visit Japan's quaint capital city.
1999. American Jack (Ansel Elgort) is a gaijin, an outsider who for some reason has run away from his family. In Tokyo, he learns Japanese and, with difficulty, passes a written exam hoping to get into the editorial office of the capital's largest newspaper. The guy naively believes that he will bring something new to the people, reveal the truth, but in the first working days he encounters a harsh reality: "You are not paid to think. You can't just write about an obvious murder - a dead body with a knife sticking out of its stomach isn't enough, you need a witness.
Jack eventually figures out that the city's crime rate is artificially low, and the Yakuza's long arms have gotten to the cops and journalists. In an ambitious quest for some justice, the hero meets a seasoned detective (Ken Watanabe), a climbing crime ladder young criminal (Sho Kasamatsu) and an American (Rachel Keller) working as a nightclub hostess.
"Tokyo Police" is so far this year's most deceptive series: it refers to the classic "Miami Vice" procedural and implicitly promises to be a kind of buddy movie about a duo of detectives scattering dozens of yakuza and nailing a criminal organization. In fact, there are almost no chases and gunfights in the frame, and the number of hand-to-hand fights can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Trying to play continuity is not the decision of the show's creators, but of Jack Edelstein, a real-life reporter who in the late 1990s began digging into the Yakuza, solved several major corruption cases, and then released his scandalous memoirs. The latter turned out to be so fascinating that Edelstein is still receiving accusations of rich fantasy.
An eight-hour thriller about yakuza activities without action and with a reporter as the main character sounds like a verdict. It would have been, but ironically the great director Michael Mann got involved in the project - it was he who produced that very "Miami Vice" in the 80's, and in the noughties he made a full-length remake. If you try to talk briefly about the method of filmmaker, the central theme of his paintings is always professionalism: Mann conducts thorough research and writes his own scripts, but the characters never load the viewer with production information. Instead, the visionary director fascinates the viewer with the logistics of work, rituals, and the lives of loners with a code of honor. So reporter Edelstein is a good addition to Mann's portrait gallery: thieves, maniacs, financiers, cops and hackers.
Mann served as executive producer on the series and directed the pilot, which, though it sets the pace and mood for the entire season, is still an unattainable height. It's a pleasure to watch the director use negative space, do long takes, choose unusual close-ups and frame the characters with a crowd, while showing nothing else - like Edelstein tensely taking an exam and forgetting the last sheet of questions or walking around neon-lit Tokyo. It's a shame that the rest of the show turns into an artless TV stunt, where every second is montage and dialogues are shot in primitive figure-of-eight sequences. The lack of visual integrity is the main disadvantage of the series. Unfortunately, the same happened recently with the drama The Road of a Thousand Leagues, but at least the talented director Kogonada shot half of the episodes there.
Otherwise, "Tokyo Police" is a small triumph: the series doesn't try to jump over the top and stays true to itself throughout the eight episodes. It's a leisurely story about everything and nothing, about heroes, the city and the craft: about the cozy and unusual-looking but dangerous Tokyo; about the daily exploits of journalists before the Internet age; about how a reporter and a young yakuza are not very different from each other, and so on. Fans of thrillers and suspenseful detectives with an Asian flavor will always have the Yakuza game series and the underrated "Giri/Haji" series. And Tokyo Police, which will hopefully be renewed for a second season, will have a special place for the strange and out of place outsider, the gaijin.
This article was sponsored by Cara Bombard
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