Harvey Keitel did it in New York. Nicolas Cage did it in New Orleans. Now it’s Shun Oguri’s turn — and this time the city is Tokyo, the director is Takashi Miike, and the teaser that landed Monday morning makes the case that the wait was worth it.
Neon released the first official teaser for “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo” today, confirming the film will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September ahead of a domestic theatrical release at a date still to be announced. The film is the third installment in the loose anthology series Abel Ferrara launched in 1992, and it follows the same playbook as its predecessors — a morally shattered cop, an investigation spiraling out of control, and a city that feels like it’s closing in — while planting the whole thing firmly in Miike’s own visual universe, FirstShowing confirmed.
A Franchise Built for Auteurs
The Bad Lieutenant series has always worked as a vehicle for a specific kind of director — someone with a strong enough vision to make a story about corruption and self-destruction feel like more than a genre exercise. Ferrara brought Catholic guilt and downtown New York grime to Harvey Keitel’s original lieutenant. Werner Herzog brought cosmic absurdism to Nicolas Cage’s New Orleans version in 2009, which AV Club noted is one of the stranger acts of franchise continuation in recent cinema history. Miike, whose filmography includes “Audition,” “Ichi the Killer,” and more than a hundred other films, was announced for this installment back in April 2025 — and the choice makes sense on paper in a way that only becomes obvious once you see the footage, Dark Horizons reported.
The premise puts Shun Oguri as a disgraced Tokyo detective whose gambling debts have left him with nothing to lose. When the daughter of a powerful American political family goes missing in the city, he ends up in an uneasy working relationship with an FBI agent played by Lily James — a partnership neither of them seems to want. Running through the background is a figure connected to the yakuza underworld who has been tracking both of them, and whose motives remain deliberately unclear through the teaser. Liv Morgan, the WWE champion, rounds out the cast in a supporting role, per Wikipedia.
What the Teaser Shows
The footage moves across neon-lit Tokyo streets, a low-lit nightclub, and a tense table scene involving several yakuza figures — images that feel immediately at home in Miike’s body of work while also carrying the specific textures of Tokyo at night that the director has been building toward for years, The Film Stage described as “one seductive teaser packed with badass shots drenched in the neon lights of Tokyo.”
The script comes from Daisuke Tengan, who wrote Miike’s “Audition” and several of his other most acclaimed films — a collaboration that gives the project a different kind of credibility than a western production parachuting into Japan for the setting. Koji Endo composed the score. The production companies behind it include OLM, Nippon TV, Pressman Film, Recorded Picture Company, and TF1 Films, with Jeremy Thomas, Sam Pressman, Naoaki Kitajima, and Misako Saka producing, per UPI. Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan handles distribution domestically in Japan.
Miike’s Statement and TIFF Premiere
When the film was first announced last year, Miike released a statement that managed to be both a genuine creative declaration and a vintage piece of self-promotion — promising he was about to “throw a fastball straight down the middle” and that the film would “break through every limit.” Whether the finished product lives up to that billing gets its first public test at TIFF in September, IndieWire confirmed, where the film will screen as a Special Presentation. Neon will release it in the United States at an unspecified point following the festival, with the studio also handling international sales.
Yahoo Entertainment pointed out that the original 1992 film earned its cult status by refusing to soften its protagonist or offer easy redemption. On the basis of the teaser, Miike has no intention of softening his either.
