Tokyo Vice review: Michael Mann’s killer start gets squandered

Episode 1 of Tokyo ViceThe wildcat moves around the streets like one. It’s almost entirely set to music — not overpowering, but percussive and steady. Quick, assured cuts keep time on-screen, giving snippets of American Jake Adelstein’s (Ansel Elgort) life in Tokyo. From the prologue we know that he will be facing down the yakuza in two years. In 1999, he’s a lonely, white, man in Tokyo who diligently tries to learn the language and culture of Tokyo. And then the episode is over. The cat goes to sleep. Perhaps it will wake again, but it won’t be anytime soon.

J.T. Rogers, HBO Max’s new crime series owes a lot to its pilot. This adaptation is based on Jake Adelstien’s real life memoir. It features Jake Adelstien’s account of Tokyo’s underworld and how he became a crime reporter from overseas. Tokyo ViceA first episode by Michael Mann gives the show a captivating start HeatFame, who’s sensibilities can turn a hectic script into an hour-long and rhythmic television show. This is in spite of the fact that the gulf between the story’s tense prologue and its proper beginning seems impossibly broad, as it introduces a painfully plain protagonist as our window into a crime story.

As Jake begins his work as a crime reporter at a lower level, the pilot shows viewers Jake. Almost immediately, he develops a hunch that two of the first violent deaths he’s assigned to write up are connected in some way. Without his bosses’ knowledge — and often to their ire — he begins an investigation of his own, grazing the edges of a simmering gang war in danger of boiling over, and gaining the attention of an unlikely partner, detective Hiroto Katagiri (Ken Watanabe).

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Tokyo ViceOnce the first episode’s style is over, the pace of the show slows down significantly. The problem is one of perspective: by positioning itself as a journalist’s story, the series begins at a level of remove from the crime plot it wants to tell about the simmering tensions between two competing criminal organizations that Jake eventually stumbles upon. Viewers have to watch Jake take his application exam and interview for his first reporting job, and patiently wait as his ambition to rise above the police blotter and break his own news collides with a culture that is not his own and an underworld he doesn’t understand.

While the script does Jake Adelstein’s character few favors, the performance from Ansel Elgort feels calibrated for something else entirely — in the pilot, we see him getting lost in the culture of his host country but there’s very little revealed about him except his cold, driven, and ambitious nature. He is a cipher, but not one that unlocks any compelling shades to the world around him — and when juxtaposed with the world-weariness of Watanabe’s detective Katagiri, the vigor of his reporter colleagues, or the hostility of the criminal element he’s flirting with, Elgort reads as flat. Pouring salt in the wound is the way he only seems to come to life in a romantic subplot with one of the show’s few white stars, Samantha (Rachel Keller), a fellow American now living in Tokyo as a hostess.

Photo: Eros Hoagland/HBO Max

Adelstein is a lackluster character. His youth and hubris lead to casual fuckups both in the newsroom as well as in the field. Yet, Adelstein finds himself in times of opportunity due to those fuckups. This makes him a wildly frustrating protagonist, as it’s his plucky Americanness that gets him into and out of trouble, and nothing particularly specific to his character.

It’s conceivable that, as Tokyo Vice gets closer to that pressure-cooker prologue, the sense of danger made palpable in the pilot will return, and Adelstein’s narrative prominence will recede as his more interesting subjects take the fore. Unfortunately, the first three episodes — which launch together today, with the rest of the 10-episode season dropping weekly, two episodes at a time — are all an exercise in lost momentum, a glimpse at a fading underworld loath to offer any perspective on it. The wildcat might have been a tabby for the entire time.

Three episodes from the first season of Tokyo ViceNow streaming on HBO Max Each Thursday two episodes new are released on HBO Max.