Jake Adelstein, the first non-Japanese reporter on staff at Japan's largest newspaper, has had his 2009 memoir about working the police beat adapted into a 10-episode series for HBO Max, "Tokyo Vice." Half that meal has been made available for review, and it is so far an intriguing mix of familiar flavors and unusual spices. How it finishes we will learn together, but so far, so very good.
I can't swear that a publisher's idea to swipe a title led to a producer's idea to get "Miami Vice" executive producer Michael Mann to direct the pilot, but in any case, that happened. (He is also an executive producer.) Like that series, the films that Mann has directed (among them "Manhunter," "Heat," "The Insider," "Blackhat") can go long on style — and stylishness, which is just a shot away from shallowness and is very much a temptation in a show filmed against the neon-bright background of modern Tokyo. But he reins it in here — a slow-motion walking shot at the top, some significant focus-shifting. Most often the series comes alive in its messier, noisier, incidental details: the stuff in Jake's little room above an eatery; the busy hive of the newspaper office; stores and restaurants and street life. It's a thriller with a touch of Anthony Bourdain.
Ansel Elgort (lately loved-hated-tolerated as Tony in Steven Spielberg's "West Side Story") plays Jake, a beanpole out of Missouri, who stands out in and above the Tokyo crowds. (He's Jewish, to boot, which makes him an even more curious figure. "Do Jews eat sushi?" he's asked in a job interview; that thing about controlling the world's economy comes up as well.) We meet him two years in advance of the actual beginning of the story, in a private room in a fancy restaurant where a yakuza suggests he might want to back off a story, before skipping back to 1999, where he is still a floppy-haired teacher of English to housewives.
