Miike Takashi Finds a Path to Redemption Without God in Toronto Title ‘Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo’: ‘It’s Not That My Aims Are to Depict Violence or Violent People’

By Naman Ramachandran

Naman Ramachandran

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Every “Bad Lieutenant” film has had to answer the same question in its own way: what happens to a corrupt man when there’s no God left to save him?

Abel Ferrara’s 1992 original built its entire moral architecture around Catholic guilt, climaxing with its lapsed-Catholic detective collapsed before a church altar, pleading for absolution from a God he’s convinced has turned away from him. When Werner Herzog picked up the mantle in 2009 with “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” he stripped that scaffolding out almost entirely, trading redemption for a more absurdist, karmic universe with no supreme being to answer to. For Miike Takashi‘s “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo,” which has its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, neither approach felt right.

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