Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tokyo Vice’ on HBO Max, Where An Expat Reporter Investigates A Crime Boss In The Japanese Metropolis

Tokyo Vice arrives on HBO Max after a lengthy gestation period. Originally set as a feature film starring Daniel Radcliffe, this eight-episode limited series based on journalist Jake Adelstein’s memoir stars Ansel Elgort as Adelstein, whose gig as a crime reporter for a Japanese-language newspaper embroils him in Tokyo’s criminal underworld. On board to executive produce the series and direct the first episode is Michael Mann, helmer of Miami Vicein its television and film iterations.

TOKYO VICE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Two men walk with purpose down a corridor. One is Japanese, older, maybe in his late fifties. His manner is that of a cop. His counterpart is a younger Caucasian man, over six feet, wearing a dark suit in the monochromatic tones and boxy cut of the late 1990s. They stop to strap themselves into Kevlar vests. “For knives,” the older man says.

The Gist: The tension in that opening sequence is palpable, full of nonverbal displays and subtle shifts in power. And not so subtle, too. The yakuza gangsters meeting in an exclusive lounge high above Tokyo with journalist Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) and his older counterpart are very clear about one thing. “We know what you’re investigating. We want you to stop. Publish, and there’s nowhere you can hide.” Serious business, to be sure, but it’s only a preamble. Tokyo Vice cuts to 1999, two years earlier, and Jake is hustling. He’s studying Japan’s economic systems, and its weather systems. He’s teaching ESL classes, practicing martial arts, and returning each night to his hovel above a tiny neighborhood restaurant. He’s also fluent in Japanese, written and spoken, a prerequisite for taking the daunting four-hour qualifying exam for the Meicho Shimbun, a leading Tokyo daily. No foreigner has ever worked at the paper. That’s about to change.

As Jake joins his fellow newbie reporters in the cramped quarters of the crime beat bullpen, he tries to acclimate to the Meicho’s rigid editorial standard. He harbors a journalist’s natural curiosity. But he’s also arrogant, and his inherent otherness as a Westerner puts him at odds with his editor, who derisively refers to him as “Gaijin.” There has been a death, a man sliced through with a sword, and Jake quickly learns how few details the police are willing to share with reporters. He follows his nose, uncovering a link between the dead man and a mysteriously vacant loan office, and ingratiates himself with Miyamoto (Hideaki Ito), a swaggering vice cop. Loosed on the Tokyo nightlife, the two visit a club, where Jake encounters ex-pat hostess Samantha (Rachel Keller, Fargo), as well as a yakuza underling (Sho Kasamatsu).

Miyamoto’s pager goes off, and Jake tags along to the scene of a disturbance. An elderly man is standing in the street, silent, clad in his Sunday best, and before anyone can stop him he lights himself on fire. Later, when Jake manages an interview with the man’s widow, she tells him the yakuza were harassing her husband over an impossible debt. And the young mafia soldier from the club is in attendance at a formal yakuza ceremony, where captains recommit their loyalty to their clan master, the oyabun. A demanding newsroom, mysterious deaths, questions about money, drinking with cops, and circling the yakuza: Jake is already deeply immersed in this layered Tokyo world, and it’s only his second day on the job.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In The Journalist, a thriller that dropped on Netflix earlier this year, a Tokyo-based reporter uncovers all kinds of corruption and shady behavior by Japanese government officials. And speaking of the yakuza, they’re being targeted by a rangy group of vigilantes in the 2018 series Smoking, with their infamous tattoos taken as scalps.

Our Take: In its pacing, look and feel, the pilot episode of Tokyo Vice is very much a Michael Mann joint. The Miami Vice and Heat director’s penchant for searching close-ups and probing handheld camera work finds menace in the silent faces watching Jake meet with the yakuza from the shadows, and a steady urban rhythm in walking feet of Tokyo commuters and clamorous din of a beery after work gathering attended by Jake and his pals in the cub reporter crew. Mann also applies his fascination with the details and activities of a workplace and its inhabitants, framing the long-limbed Ansel Elgort as both a physical outsider and thirsty young grunt as he strides through the organized chaos of the Meicho Shimbun newsroom on his first day as the paper’s first foreign-born reporter.

For his part, Elgort seems at ease inside Jake’s restless skin. He doesn’t overplay his Western-style arrogance – Jake is brash, willing to try a joke in his job interview with the newspaper, but possessed of a greenhorn’s tenacity, too, just walking into the police precinct to ask for help with access. As for his relationships with Miyamoto and Ken Watanabe’s Detective Katagiri, it will be interesting to watch how Elgort incorporates what Jake has learned about the world he’s entered. Tokyo is depicted as a place of green-lit shadows, hilly blind alleys, and rain-slicked nighttime streets, the latter certainly a particular feature of so much of Mann’s work on Miami Vice. But the atmosphere is appropriate for the mix of menace and secrecy at play with the yakuza, who figure to become Jake’s biggest headache as Tokyo Vice rolls on, deep into the night.

Sex and Skin: When Jake encounters Samantha in the hostess club, singing Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” with the verses in Japanese and chorus in English, it’s clear he’s as taken with her as the young yakuza guy sitting nearby, the one with a fresh sleeve of irezumi that Jake notices has been applied by hand, in the traditional manner.

Parting Shot: Jake has returned to the site of the old man’s suicide. He imagines him standing there on the curb, dousing himself with gas, and dutifully striking a match. Whatever the hold over this man, it was so strong that public self-immolation was his only recourse. The option of least shame.

Sleeper Star: In the pilot episode’s brief introduction, when his detective character speaks a few quick lines, and later, when he says nothing but is seen to peer at a corpse and smoke cigarettes at the crime scene, Ken Watanabe emanates forbearance and gravity.

Most Pilot-y Line: Jake’s eager commitment to Japanese cultural mores can’t fully align with his conditioning and upbringing as a Westerner. “I’m trying really hard to fit into their system,” Jake tells Samantha over champagne in the hostess club. “Which is mentally tyrannical, which is not what I expected from a newspaper.” It’s an expectation that probably suggests more about Jake than it does the publishers and editors of the Meicho Shimbun.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Tokyo Vice mixes a noirish atmosphere with the dynamics of a Western journalist looking for answers in an environment that isn’t always what he thinks it is.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges