Despite its oozy 47% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes, Michael Mann’s Miami Vice has enjoyed a critical reappraisal lately. What could be so wrong about picking a city, throwing in some guns and OTT actors, and letting the bombastic action spectacle unfold?
Mann directs the pilot episode of new series Tokyo Vice and executive produces all eight episodes, bringing his slick action style to the realms of non-fiction this time.
Tokyo Vice will be available to watch exclusively on Paramount+, with every episode dropping on May 24. That means Australian visitors to this world of cop corruption and yakuza violence will have to wait until the rest of the world has already watched the series week-by-week to get in on the action…better late than never, we say.
The series is based on Jake Edelstein’s 2009 memoir Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. We could’ve seen Daniel Radcliffe play Edelstein in a planned 2013 film, showing the reporter’s work with one of Japan’s largest newspapers and undercover insight from working with a respected older detective.
That film never went ahead, but playwright and project screenwriter J.T. Rogers returned to pen the first and last episodes of an HBO TV adaptation, now starring Ansel Elgort as the floppy-haired rookie. We last saw the actor in West Side Story, but he was sidelined in buzz and promotional materials due to accusations of sexual assault.
In the trailer above, Pacific Rim star Rinko Kikuchi challenges Elgort’s motives for going down the rabbit hole of crime and corruption: “You think because you’re a foreigner, the rules are different?” Her character is a fictionalised composite of many of Edelstein’s coworkers, whereas Inception actor Ken Watanabe stands in as Katagiri, the veteran detective who becomes a father figure to the young journo.
“What’s it like to be a yakuza? I could write about that,” Elgort offers to handsome gangster Sato (Show Kasamatsu). The reply is playful: “Yes, but then I’d have to kill you.” We should be a bit safer than Elgort, watching his descent into the seedy criminal underworld through a protective streaming screen. Soon.
