Television review The controversial memoirs of Jake Adelstein, who worked as a crime reporter in Japan, were turned into an HBO series that draws from dull cultural clashes

Culture|Television review

Film director Michael Mann has also gained a reputation as a television producer. That reputation is based, above all, on a series of detectives from the extreme 80s Miami Vice (1984–1990), but it is also worth mentioning the script written around the racetrack Luck (2011–2012).

Jake Adelstein in turn, is an American crime reporter who worked for 12 years in a major Japanese newspaper writing in Japanese. In 2009, he published a memoir of these rare experiences Tokyo Viceof which JT Rogers has developed and Mann produced the eight-part HBO series.

Opening scene leads Adelstein (uncomplicated Ansel Elgort) and detective Hiroto Katagirin (intensive Ken Watanabe) with the Yakuzos. Let’s move back in time to 1999. A bloody murder victim soon linked to a suspicious series of deaths.

Even with these initial layouts, it comes as a surprise that Tokyo Vice at least during its first four episodes, is not so much a series of crimes as a series of dramas in which the violence of the Yakuza causes extra heartbeat.

Adelstein fortunately, follow-up is more interesting than for the average culture shock patient. Thanks to his hard-working language study, he is partly inside the culture, but still the newspaper’s rigid editorial culture and semi-racist suspicion of “gaijin” come to the skin.

At the companion nightclub, Adelstein gets to know Samantha (Rachel Keller), the story of which is also told independently. The young Yakuza Sato (Shô Kasamatsu).

Samantha (Rachel Keller) Earn a living by sitting in a nightclub with men as long as they keep ordering drinks. Picture: Eros Hoagland

Other including The Hollywood Reporter in the article has argued that much of it Tokyo Vice would have been invented.

Bad to say, but with a whimsical sense of credibility, the series gets stuck so that the main part of Elgort looks quite From Ronan Farrowfrom an investigative journalist who complained to a film producer Harvey Weinstein.

Tokyo Vice, HBO Max. (K16)