“Tokyo Vice” arrives on HBO Max wrapped in layers of nostalgia, beginning with its title, which sounds like a come-on from Cinemax’s late-night heyday. It’s a reasonably tasty hand roll of yakuza drama and turn-of-the-20th-century American coming-of-age tale, and it is generous with the condiments that combination promises: full-body tattoos and missing fingers, point-and-shoot cameras and bonding over the Backstreet Boys.
It also indulges in a full measure of Western fetishizing of Japanese cool and the notion of Tokyo as the world’s most stylish den of sin, in a way that occasionally recalls the movie “Lost in Translation,” which came out around the time the series is set. Hostess and host clubs, love hotels, picturesque alleys around the corner from shimmering seas of neon — you know the drill.
And like “Lost in Translation,” with its voluptuous, melancholy romanticism, “Tokyo Vice” finesses its exoticism by asserting a distinctive style — in this case the moody, atmospheric naturalism of Michael Mann, who directed the pilot (one of three episodes premiering Thursday) and helped set the look and rhythms of the series.
After opening with a flash-forward to Jake (Ansel Elgort) in a perilous confrontation, the show shifts back to 1999, when he passes the newspaper’s hiring examination. As part of its genre package, “Tokyo Vice” is also an above-average journalism story, and the interplay among Jake, two fellow new hires (Kosuke Tanaka and Takaki Uda) and their editor (Rinko Kikuchi) gives the show a structure and an undercurrent of prickly office comedy.
The focus, though, is on a pair of more traditionally melodramatic groupings, both romantic in their way. One involves Jake, a soulful young yakuza he befriends named Sato (Show Kasamatsu) and a secretive bar hostess to whom they’re both drawn, Samantha (Rachel Keller of “Legion”).
Neither the screenplay nor the performers give the Jake-Sato-Samantha situation any heat, however; through the five episodes (of eight) available for review, not much has happened, and it’s hard to care whether anything will. Luckily, there’s more going on in another triangle, the one involving Jake, the yakuza at large and Hiroto Katagiri, a Japanese cop (Ken Watanabe).
Here we get the pleasure of seeing Watanabe, the powerful Japanese actor familiar to Western audiences from the recent “Godzilla” movies and the 2018 remake of “The King and I,” embody a frustrated detective who is unwilling to take bribes or to stand by while the yakuza conduct business as usual.
Hiroto is smart and pragmatic enough to notice that Jake — using his journalism instincts and his American brashness — has gained an entree with the criminals that the police can exploit to head off a brewing gang war. But he’s also compassionate enough to want to protect Jake, and to teach him how to navigate the Tokyo underworld, and Watanabe puts across both sides of the character with economy and style.
As you might have guessed by now, the mechanics of the story in “Tokyo Vice” are familiar from decades’ worth of both Japanese and American gangster films. But they’re treated with sufficient respect and professionalism, and just enough imagination, to make another ticket on this particular Shinjuku carnival ride worth the investment, at least if you’re inclined to enjoy leisurely neo-noir.
That’s one pleasant surprise that develops as you watch the show. Another is the work of Elgort, the young actor — he just turned 28 — who made his name as a teenage heartthrob, and whose performance as Tony was not one of the more notable features of Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.”
He’s still not giving what you’d call a fully fleshed performance, but the gawky enthusiasm, impatience and casual American arrogance of the half-formed Jake fit him well, and he’s comfortable and engaging in the role. (He also delivers a lot of his dialogue in Japanese, which he reportedly learned for the series.) As he pedals madly through Tokyo’s streets, wearing Jake’s mandatory cheap suit and omnipresent backpack, we can heave a collective sigh for our youth.
