Name: Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo
Director: Takashi Miike
Genre: Thriller, Crime, Action
Released: 2026-09-14T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 108 min
Cast: Shun Oguri, Lily James, Liv Morgan, Shotaro Mamiya, Shuhei Nomura

A Tokyo detective who gambles, shakes down the city’s small-time criminals and treats old yakuza cases as currency with his creditors is assigned to help an FBI agent find an American politician’s missing daughter. That is the premise of Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, Takashi Miike’s new crime thriller with Shun Oguri and Lily James, as described by the critics who saw it in Toronto. The bigger story sits behind the screen: a title that once meant one notorious New York film is now being run as a franchise, and Miike is the director hired to prove the brand can travel.

The logic is easy to read. Pressman Film, the company behind both earlier Bad Lieutenant films, has announced a series of sequels set in cities around the world, each built around corrupt law enforcement in a new place. Handing the first of them to Japan’s most prolific provocateur, a filmmaker whose name alone sells transgression abroad, looked like the safest bet available. The first reviews suggest it was not.

Shun Oguri, one of Japan’s most bankable leading men, plays Yabuki, billed in Japanese press materials as the worst crooked cop in history. Lily James, the British star of Cinderella and Pam & Tommy, plays the FBI agent, and WWE’s Liv Morgan, in her first film role, plays the missing daughter. Read as a business plan, the casting covers three audiences at once: a domestic box-office lead for Sony’s Japanese release, a recognizable English-language name for NEON in North America, and a wrestling following that rarely turns up for Japanese crime cinema. What casting cannot guarantee is fit, and that is where the Toronto notices went first. JoBlo’s Chris Bumbray wrote that “James is spectacularly miscast as a hard-boiled FBI agent who’s supposed to be our antihero’s equal.”

Miike’s career explains why the bet was made. His filmography runs from the extreme cult titles that built his reputation abroad, Audition and Ichi the Killer, to the studio samurai epics and manga adaptations that fill Japanese multiplexes. The screenplay here is by Daisuke Tengan, who wrote Audition (1999) and adapted 13 Assassins (2010) for him. Producer Jeremy Thomas, whose Recorded Picture Company backed 13 Assassins, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai and Blade of the Immortal, is on board again. On paper, this is Miike’s international team reassembled for a brand-name job.

The brand itself has always been elastic. Abel Ferrara’s original, co-written with Zoë Lund and starring Harvey Keitel, and Werner Herzog‘s Port of Call New Orleans (2009), with Nicolas Cage, share a title, a producer and a corrupt cop, and very little else. Sam Pressman has framed the new series in exactly those terms, praising how “maestros Ferrara and Herzog delivered films as radically different as their own voices.” The pitch is that Bad Lieutenant is a frame, not a formula, and that each city gets an auteur strong enough to fill it.

Toronto suggests the frame is harder to fill than it sounds. The film holds 39% on Rotten Tomatoes from 18 reviews and 46 on Metacritic. The Film Stage’s C.J. Prince called it “a dull, insipid, lazy take on a formula designed to let loose” and wrote that “Miike directs while asleep at the wheel.” CGMagazine’s Brendan Frye went the other way, arguing that “Takashi Miike has not lost his edge” while conceding that “there is simply too much going on.” Critics cannot even agree on the excess the brand sells: JoBlo found “a pretty restrained movie, with only a couple of short bursts of violence,” while CGMagazine called it “messy, violent, and often bewildering.”

The premise also leaves a structural question open. Ferrara’s film needed no outsider to guide the audience through its city; this one sends an American agent into Tokyo, the oldest bridge in Japanese-American co-production, familiar since Ridley Scott’s Black Rain. That device tends to turn the city into a backdrop for a visitor. Whether Miike resists it or leans into it is something the reviews describe differently, and nobody outside Toronto and Japan can check yet.

The ensemble around Oguri, James and Morgan includes Shotaro Mamiya, Shuhei Nomura, Nanase Nishino, Yuka Kouri, Takanori Iwata, Keisuke Watanabe, Hideo Nakano, Jun Murakami and Jun Kunimura, with a special appearance by Hiroshi Tachi. Nobuyasu Kita shot it, Naoichiro Sagara edited it and Koji Endo composed the score. Jeremy Thomas, Sam Pressman, Naoaki Kitajima and Misako Saka produced for Nippon TV, Pressman Film, Recorded Picture Company, OLM and TF1 Films. Ado sings the theme song, “Raven Sky,” which Miike called, in Japanese press materials, desperately beautiful.

A still from Takashi Miike film Bad Lieutenant Tokyo, 2026 — A still from *Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo* (2026), directed by Takashi Miike

The film had its world premiere in the Special Presentations section of the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14, 2026, and opens in Japanese cinemas on October 23, 2026, through Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan, ahead of every other territory. It runs 108 minutes, in Japanese and English. NEON holds the North American rights and has not announced a U.S. release date; no other territory has a confirmed date yet.

Japan therefore delivers the first verdict that counts. If Oguri’s audience shows up, Pressman has a model it can sell city by city. If it does not, Bad Lieutenant goes back to being the name of two very different films, and a brand is only as good as the director who happens to be holding it.