Series based on true events are still in high demand: It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s classic true crime material or those imposter stories that recently made the new version of the Comfort TV were.
The glittering neon “Tokyo Vice” is also based on true events, the experiences of an American reporter in Japan in the 1990s. Jake Adelstein worked for the Yomiuri Shinbun, the world’s largest-circulation newspaper, for twelve years. He summarized his career between yakuza bosses and police, hostesses and half-world greats in his memoirs “Tokyo Vice”. As the first Western “Gaijin” to ever work for the renowned publication, Adelstein, as a crime reporter, sheds an outsider’s perspective on the strictly regulated and, in our eyes, strangely ritualized interaction between law, crime and the media – and provides insights into the internal mechanisms of two very different ones Organizations like the Yakuza and the Japanese media world.
In the book, Adelstein uses insider knowledge, real cases and hair-raising anecdotes to craft a snappy and wild ride through a decade of his life as a reporter. It is understandable that the fictionalized series version takes additional liberties: It focuses on a special case from Adelstein’s eventful career, in which a renowned bank and a yakuza clan are involved in shady dealings. As Adelstein ventures deeper into the world of organized crime as he investigates, he soon has the attention of two high-ranking bosses.
Even when his book was published, some of the particularly remarkable details in Adelstein’s version of events were called into question: they were unbelievable, factually incorrect or excessively exaggerated. In the context of the usual exaggerations and exaggerations of a series, however, these flaws hardly carry any weight. On the one hand not because producer John Lesher openly admits that Adelstein’s book was just a loose inspiration to spin an independent story from it. On the other hand, these criticisms seem irrelevant, because at least for the first half of the season, “Tokyo Vice” seems like the plot is just a side issue. The depiction of different milieus of the semi-world and underworld as well as the detailed sketching of the characters are in the foreground, while in the background the turf war between two yakuza clans unfolds. The series is actually driven by different fates, but less so by Adelstein (Ansel Elgort); Even more so are the fates of hostess Samantha (Rachel Keller), who fled Mormon Utah for swanky Tokyo, of junior yakuza Sato (Show Kasamatsu), who works his way up through the ranks, or of police officer Hiroto (Ken Watanabe), who wants to enforce the law from the network of dependencies.
The plot rarely picks up momentum at the beginning, “Tokyo Vice” initially tells its story with cool leisurelyness. The cool and concise high-gloss look with which director and producer Michael Mann (“Miami Vice”, “Heat”) captures the action fits perfectly with this restraint. The focus on the strong, if not always cliché-free, characters also makes the cast shine. The greatest acting highlights are not provided by the main actor Elgort as the often latently greasy know-it-all Adelstein, but by a female trio: Rachel Keller as the strong-willed Samantha, the always nuanced Ella Rumpf as her vivacious hostess colleague Polina and Rinko Kikuchi as Adelstein’s boss Emi Maruyama, who poses as woman has to break through in the male-dominated newspaper business.
Overall, “Tokyo Vice” impresses as a concisely staged neo-noir series for the series menu, which pleasantly stands out from Netflix fast food or Disney franchise fare (Starz play).
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