Takashi Miike's 'Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo' First Look Revealed
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- IndieWire exclusively revealed the first look at "Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo," a neo-noir directed by Takashi Miike and written by his frequent collaborator Daisuke Tengan.
- Lily James, Shun Oguri, and WWE wrestler Liv Morgan star in the film, which follows a disgraced Tokyo detective entangled with a vengeful ex-yakuza, an enigmatic FBI agent, and a missing daughter of a powerful American family.
- The film will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, with Neon handling domestic release and international sales at an unspecified later date.
- Miike described the project as "a fastball straight down the middle of your strike zone — no tricks, no gimmicks" in a statement when the film was first announced in 2025.
- The "Bad Lieutenant" lineage began with Abel Ferrara's 1992 Harvey Keitel film, followed 17 years later by Werner Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" starring Nicolas Cage — though Ferrara famously disavowed Herzog's entry and said he hoped Herzog and Cage would "die in Hell" for making it.
- The franchise has no official continuity between entries, making Miike's version the third major auteur reinterpretation of the corrupt-cop premise.
Why it matters: Three major directors (Ferrara, Herzog, Miike) have now reinterpreted the same corrupt-cop premise across three continents without any official continuity — making this one of Hollywood's strangest unofficial franchises. Neon's decision to acquire domestic rights ahead of TIFF positions the distributor to monetize festival buzz from a filmmaker with a devoted cult international following.
