Michael Mann’s first directorial effort since 2015’s “Blackhat” comes to HBO Max this Thursday, April 7th, with the highly anticipated debut of “Tokyo Vice,” the loose adaptation of the memoir of the same name by Jake Adelstein. At first, the series seems like a perfect fit for the director of “Miami Vice,” “Collateral,” and “Public Enemies.” It’s another stylish venture that centers on morally questionable men and the women who find themselves both drawn to them and betrayed by them. However, the premiere will likely fall a little short for all but the most hardcore fans of Mann’s aesthetic. It’s nice to see such an accomplished craftsman working in morally gray areas again with a consistently strong visual language that doesn’t underline themes or even makes it very clear from the beginning what this show is going to be about. However, the premiere feels a little thin for Mann, not as visually daring as his film work or as narratively challenging as one might expect. Be patient. As “Tokyo Vice” develops its voice over the next few episodes, it actually gets better as it leaves the expectations of a “Michael Mann project” behind and allows other talents to direct this increasingly rich tapestry of the ’90s Tokyo underground.
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“Tokyo Vice” is really a show about users. It’s about journalists, gangsters, cops, and bar girls—people who know how to push buttons to get what they need. Into this cauldron of questionable characters is dropped one Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort), a Missouri-born journalist who moves to Tokyo and becomes the only white reporter at the city’s major newspaper. Especially in the early episodes, it’s a bit hard to shake the sense that this is yet another story of another culture being told through white eyes, a structure that film and television has been smartly moving away from over the years. It doesn’t help that Elgort looks a little lost in early episodes, making the premiere feel more like an antiquated “fish out of water” or “culture clash” tale than the show ultimately becomes when Jake settles into his unique role at the paper and the writers allow other characters to have agency beyond how they impact the white protagonist.
It helps that the supporting cast of “Tokyo Vice” becomes increasingly more interesting than Adelstein himself. The living legend that is Ken Watanabe plays Hiroto Katagiri, a detective in the organized crime division in Tokyo who befriends Adelstein, helping him investigate some stories related to a Yakuza underworld that’s so powerful that they can basically leave murdered bodies in plain sight and know that no one will report the truth about them. Watanabe brings a gravity that balances Elgort’s wide-eyed puppy approach well, which allows the show to become about a foreigner who can easily get in over his head more than the awkward premiere implies.
In fact, the show gets richer as it moves away from othering the Japanese culture that Adelstein doesn’t fully comprehend and lets the characters develop in it. Take the young Yakuza soldier named Sato, played by future star Shô Kasamatsu, who gives one of the most stunning performances by a TV newcomer in years. Sato’s story is more interesting than Jake’s, but the show really elevates when it pairs the two, either in direct scenes in which they have fascinating buddy chemistry or what could be considered parallel tracks of two young men learning the ropes of their organizations. Kasamatsu is riveting, giving a performance that’s never showy but impossible to take your eyes off of.
The women get lesser development in the first five episodes of the series sent for press, especially Rinko Kikuchi, who feels wasted as Jake’s editor. However, Rachel Keller’s Samantha gets more interesting as her back story is unpacked over the course of the season. She’s a bar girl, someone who sits with rich businessmen and entertains them, but she has dreams of opening her own establishment and hints of a dark past. Keller, who was so great on “Fargo,” allows Samantha to have her own complex agency. The woman who often has the ear of the journalists, gangsters, and cops—sometimes on the same night—could have merely become a plot device, but the young actress finds unexpected ways to make her feel genuine.
What about Elgort? At first, it feels like he might be as distracting as he was in “West Side Story,” and not just because of the off-camera baggage he brings for viewers but that he seems increasingly overwhelmed in these big productions as an actor. Having said that, he adjusts nicely as the show becomes richer, better in the casual moments like being playful with fellow journalists or arguing about the meaning of a boy band’s song than he is when he has to get dramatic while working on a story. As he convinces his editor to investigate a string of suicides in the city, he has a habit of looking buried in the material, but that could be part of the point—that this is the story of a young man who was thrust into a world that was way more complex than he could have imagined fits Elgort’s occasionally lost look.
What is “Tokyo Vice”? It’s still not completely clear what this series is trying to say or do after five episodes as all of these various characters and subplots bounce off each other. Again, it feels like a show about interconnected systems of users—journalists who trade information with cops that then influence the action of the criminal underworld, and the women caught in the crossfire. After a narratively rocky start held together largely through Michael Mann’s undeniable craftsmanship, the show slowly comes into its own over the next few episodes, becoming richer and more interesting with each one. It’s a program that will demand patience, but that increasingly feels like it will be worth the effort. [B+]
