Just a few hours after the first-look images arrived, NEON has released the first trailer for Takashi Miike’s “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo,” offering a much more substantial taste of the filmmaker’s neon-soaked contribution to the loosely connected crime franchise.
Shun Oguri leads the film as a disgraced Tokyo detective whose addictions and increasingly corrupt behavior pull him into a tangled investigation. Lily James plays an enigmatic FBI agent searching for the missing daughter of a powerful American family, portrayed by WWE star Liv Morgan, while a vengeful former yakuza and a mysterious killer further complicate the case.
Written by Daisuke Tengan, who previously collaborated with Miike on “Audition” and “13 Assassins,” the film continues the basic tradition established by Abel Ferrara’s harrowing 1992 “Bad Lieutenant” and Werner Herzog’s deranged 2009 quasi-follow-up, “Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans.” Rather than directly continuing either story, each installment revolves around a deeply compromised police officer plunging further into violence, addiction, and moral decay.
Miike is about as natural a choice as anyone to inherit that concept. The prolific Japanese filmmaker has spent decades moving between yakuza thrillers, horror films, samurai epics, musicals, family entertainment, and just about everything else, frequently mixing extreme violence with an equally unpredictable sense of humor.
James recently told The Playlist that making the film in Japan was “a highlight of my career,” describing Miike as a filmmaker who frequently works with “one or two takes max.” She also revealed that an elaborate nightclub action sequence that might have taken more than a week on a larger production was completed in a single day.
Oguri, meanwhile, has previously worked with Miike on films including “Crows Zero,” “Sukiyaki Western Django,” and “Terra Formars.” The ensemble also includes Shotaro Mamiya, Shūhei Nomura, Nanase Nishino, Yuka Kouri, Takanori Iwata, Keisuke Watanabe, Hideo Nakano, Jun Murakami, Jun Kunimura, and Hiroshi Tachi.
“Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo” will make its world premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, which runs September 10–20. NEON has not announced a domestic theatrical date and currently lists the film only as “coming soon.”
Watch the first trailer below.
