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.
