Blood-Splattered Tokyo Fever Dream Stuns Toronto Film Festival

Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan Takashi Miike ( Audition , Ichi the Killer , Blade of the Immortal ) should own the trademark for the term “gonzo,” considering that the ultra-prolific Japanese auteur (who has more than 100 feature directorial credits to his name) is cinema’s preeminent over-the-top auteur.

There isn’t an artist alive who more enthusiastically relishes lunatic extremism, and he brings his hallmark madman verve to Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo , an amusingly outrageous and gory film noir about a ne’er-do-well up to his neck in nastiness.

The third installment of a loose anthology that includes Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult-classic original and Werner Herzog’s wackadoo Nicolas Cage-headlined 2009 Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans , Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo —world premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival—is of a piece with its predecessors, spinning a tangled yarn of cops-and-robbers deviance and duplicity that revolves around a police officer who, per the title, is exceedingly naughty.

In this instance, that’s Yabuki ( Godzilla vs.

Kong ’s Shun Oguri), a Japanese detective who’s a compendium of every vice known to mankind.

“Welcome to the world of low-life scum,” says a yakuza henchman to Yabuki, and Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo is all too happy to be there.

In a leather jacket and with a permanent hangover sullying his mood, Yabuki is off the rails, dropping off his two kids at school and then, before pulling away, snorting cocaine in front of their passing classmates.

At home, he discovers that his wife has left him.

Given what we subsequently learn about him, it’s amazing that she stuck around long enough to have his children.

Yabuki loves drugs of all sorts, whether they go up his nose or into his arm, and he additionally has a taste for two call girls, one of whom pleasures him against a ping-pong table while the other films their escapades on her smartphone.

Working from Daisuke Tengan’s playfully depraved script, Miike doesn’t stop there, revealing that Yabuki has a gambling problem that’s landed him deep in debt, such that the crime boss he owes gives him one week to settle up before things turn ugly.

Yabuki is concerned about this, but only to a point, since he carries himself with a nonchalant self-destructive streak a mile wide—a consequence of feeling damned for a terrible betrayal fifteen years earlier that put him in bed with the city’s reigning yakuza clan.

Although the yakuza have supposedly disbanded and gone underground, the Tokyo depicted by Miike is a seedy, shadowy realm populated by cretins, and Yabuki is dragged back into the muck—or, at least, a different division of it—when he’s asked to take a look at a naked corpse whose neck has been horribly snapped.