Tokyo Vice (Season Two)

Tokyo Vice (Season Two)

MAXIMUM

08 February 2024
By Kyle Mullin
Photo by James Lisle/Max
Web Exclusive

A lit cigarette quivers on Hiroto Katagiri's lips as he anxiously stares at a clue etched into a matchbook during one of the best new scenes in Tokyo Vice. The jaded but tough detective (played by Oscar nominee Ken Watanabe) unfurls a sturdy six-shooter – one that wouldn't look out of place in a classic noir thriller – while tracking down the corpse of Gin Miyamoto. Played with great gusto by Hideaki Ito, Miyamoto was a crooked cop recently recruited by Katagiri to become a mole in Tokyo's notorious yakuza mafia. Clearly, these thugs want to send a message to the police. These are masterfully shot scenes and performances, with equally on-site props and set design, in the first two episodes of Tokyo Viceits second season.

This season of the uneven but unique and compelling Far Eastern crime saga is off to a stronger start than the series” first season. Based on the memoir of the same name by American journalist Jake Eddelstein, Tokyo Vice's Early episodes depicted the fluently bilingual but not quite culturally savvy rookie rising through the ranks Meicho Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper in the 1990s. It's indeed a tired trope to give the audience a Western perspective on an Eastern culture, but it's made even worse by star Ansel Elgort's gritty performance and even more flimsy writing of his character as a crime reporter. The Japanese actors and their characters were far more interesting, from Watanabe's Gumshoe Katagiri to Eddelstein's no-nonsense editor Emi Maruyama (Rinko Kikuchi, also an Oscar nominee Babylonia), or the once fierce but now ailing yakuza boss Shinzo Tozawa (Ayumi Tanida), and especially the rising but ambivalent thug Sato (Shô Kasamatsu).

Rather than bog down the narrative every time they appear on screen, Elgort (Baby Driver, West Side Story) and expat Samantha Porter (Rachel Keller? Legion, Fargo) now give much more live performances of rich written material. Porter spent the first season working at one of Tokyo's hostess clubs, where customers pay to drink expensive drinks and the staff pretend to enjoy chatting and flirting with them. This season, she runs her own club, much to the chagrin of fellow hostess Polina, whose murder was caught on tape, a copy of which was mysteriously given to Eddelstein in the season one finale. Edelstein finally appears competent as a reporter. Instead of enduring Maruyama's lectures (although her insistence on “stop using so many adjectives” in the first season is still hilarious), Eddelstein now impresses her with his reporting and photography. There's one early scene in particular where Edelstein infiltrates a biker gang, only to be pressured into becoming their accomplice. It boasts more thrills and suspense than the entire arc of Season One.

Aside from the subplots, Edelstein is mainly concerned with solving Polina's murder. When he manages to identify the man attacking her on videotape, he and his police ally Katagiri begin to realize that Tokyo's moral rot extends beyond the yakuza and corrupt cops to the upper echelons of power. And when he and Maruyama try to interview the suspect, his incredible tendency to disobey Japanese hierarchies gets him into trouble again. But this time, Elgort is convincingly nuanced, instead of looking like the crazy kid we saw last season.

If the once-weaker characters and cast members continue to show such promise, and if the main arc is fleshed out with more subplots of the week, such as the gripping biker gang reporting, Tokyo Vice he will become as shapely and formidable as the Japanese actors whose talent held up the last season. (www.max.com/shows/tokyo-vice/)

Author Rating: 7.5/10