‘Tokyo Vice’ Episode 1 Recap: Mann Up

An intrepid reporter. A grizzled cop. A naked city. A string of suspicious deaths. An all-powerful criminal organization. Michael Mann, a legit film legend, in the director’s seat. All the pieces seem to be in place for Tokyo Vice, HBO Max’s new crime drama, to be a winner…but there’s one big piece of the puzzle that’s misplaced.

Ansel Elgort stars as Jake Adelstein, an American expat in late-’90s Tokyo who becomes the first foreign-born reporter at a major metropolitan newspaper. His natural-seeming fluency with Japanese smooths out a lot of the fish-out-of-water stuff you might expect from a story like this, though he does have to defuse the unthinking anti-Semitism of some of his colleagues with well-timed jokes.

Adelstein’s biggest professional problem isn’t really fitting into the newspaper’s culture, but gelling with its reporting style, which sanitizes ugly facts of life in Japan like, y’know, murder.

On his first full day as a reporter, Adelstein travels to a crime scene where a man has been stabbed to death by a traditional-looking blade. (It’s here where he gets his first glimpse of a detective played by Ken Watanabe, with whom he pays a visit to the yakuza in the show’s cold open, set two years after the rest of the events of the episode.)

After doing some snooping into the man’s mail and discovering he owes big to a mysterious loan company with a distinctive logo, Adelstein writes the story up as a matter of murder…and is immediately chewed out by his editors for using the m-word without first getting the go-ahead from the cops. (“I just think—” “You don’t get paid to think!” runs the drearily clichéd dialogue.)

But the cops aren’t about to give Adelstein the answer he wants on matters like this either. Later in the episode, Adelstein links up with a seen-it-all cop named Miyamoto (Hideaki Itō), who informs him that “there’s no murder in Japan….Unless you have to deal with a witness, it’s not a murder.” Well, that’s certainly one way of keeping the crime rate down!

[A brief complaint: The club to which Miyamoto and Adelstein go for their big talk—and where we meet Samantha (Rachel Keller) and Polina (Ella Rumpf), hostesses at the club—is blasting the song “Motivation” by Kelly Rowland and Lil Wayne, a song that would not be released until 12 years after the events of the episode. Music is maybe the single easiest way to convey the period of your period piece, so a whiff like this really rankles.]

Then Adelstein and Miyamoto show up at a scene where a man is about to kill himself by setting himself on fire. Miyamoto can’t stop him, but after the fact, in some sort of cosmic coincidence, Adelstein discovers that tell-tale logo on a pack of matches in the man’s position. Having earlier traced the logo to a vacant office, he now approaches the second dead man’s wife, who explains that he was in deep to loan sharks from the yakuza.

Speaking of whom, they’ve just had a promotion ceremony for members moving up the ranks. Everybody clap!

The biggest problem facing Tokyo Vice is the matter of its leading man. I’m not even talking about the sexual abuse and misconduct allegations swirling around Ansel Elgort, although yes, that too. But even as a simple matter of casting the right man for the job, something feels off here. Elgort’s affect is too flat, his eyes too blank, his semi-permanent sneer too pronounced. You can’t exactly do “wide-eyed idealistic rookie reporter learns the ropes in a strange land’s seedy underbelly” when the actor involved couldn’t be wide-eyed to save his life. (It’s possible the show leaned away from the more traditional approach to the part on purpose, but where Elgort’s concerned it comes across more as a matter of necessity.)

It’s worth comparing and contrasting Elgort’s casting to that of Miles Teller in Nicholas Wending Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young, another stylish cop thriller directed by a major talent, over on Amazon Prime Video. Teller’s character is supposed to be a dead-eyed, flat-affect sociopath, so selecting a fundamentally unlikeable actor and playing up his emptiness makes a lot of sense. (Hell, Tom Cruise has made a career out of it, including in collaboration with Michael Mann!) There’s none of that logic present in Elgort’s use in Tokyo Vice.

Fortunately, the real star of the premiere (titled “The Test”) is director Michael Mann, the supreme Hollywood stylist and crime specialist brought in as a ringer to handle the all-important first episode. (Other directors will handle subsequent episodes; the series as a whole was created by writer J.T. Rogers, based on the real Adelstein’s book of the same name.)

While there are limits to what Mann can do with Elgort, he makes it a pleasure to…how can I put this…to just look at stuff. Quick closeups on signs and objects, a convincingly nocturnal approach to lighting spaces, the overall sense of the city teeming with life and death—Mann sketches all of this out beautifully, impressionistically. I don’t wanna get myself into “You don’t get paid to think!” cliché territory, but, well, the city of Tokyo is a character in this thing, and it gets a star turn thanks to Mann’s camera. It’s that, more than anything else, that will keep me coming back to see if the city’s co-stars can get on that level.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.