HBO Max’s Tokyo Vice makes an incredible impression and slowly blows it all
The first episode of Tokyo Vice moves like a wildcat stalking the streets. 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. We know, from the brief prologue, that in two years he will find himself staring down yakuza who will want him dead. Now, in 1999, he is just a lonely white man in Tokyo, diligently applying himself to the language, the culture, the city, and the very beginnings of a career as a reporter. Then the episode ends. The cat slumbers. Perhaps it will wake again, but it won’t be anytime soon.
Created by J.T. Rogers, HBO Max’s new crime series owes a lot to its pilot. An adaptation of the memoir by real-life writer Jake Adelstien and his account of the Tokyo underworld as a crime writer from abroad, Tokyo Vice gets a mesmerizing start thanks to a first episode directed by Michael Mann of Heat fame, whose sensibilities tie a busy script into a rhythmic and quietly relentless hour of television. 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.
The pilot introduces viewers to Jake as he begins work as low level crime reporter. 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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