Does understanding the assignment mean anything anymore

Takashi Miike's Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo is being celebrated for understanding the assignment — for inheriting Abel Ferrara's 1992 original and Werner Herzog's 2005 remake as a natural heir to their ultra-violent, morally corroded visions of law enforcement. The trailer confirms what you'd expect: neon-soaked Tokyo streets, a cop sliding into depravity, an aesthetic that looks right. But the assignment has been misunderstood before, and the wreckage tells you what's at stake.

Farrara's 1992 Bad Lieutenant worked because it was sui generis — unmoved by whether audiences wanted to watch Harvey Keitel's lieutenant urinate on a statue or proposition sex workers. The film was tethered to post-Giuliani New York, to the specific corruption of a police culture that believed it could operate outside accountability. The violence wasn't performed. It felt inevitable, the logical endpoint of a system that had made immunity a kind of policy.

Herzog's 2005 remake tried to replicate this. Same badge, same corruption, same visual brutality. He moved it to post-Katrina New Orleans and cast Nicolas Cage. The result was a film that looked violent and morally unmoored without being tethered to the specific city and moment that made those qualities feel inevitable rather than performed. Herzog understood Ferrara's technique. He did not understand what had made Ferrara's film matter. Which was not the shock value. Its grounding in a particular place where that shock felt like testimony rather than spectacle.

Now Miike inherits the franchise in Tokyo, a city with its own police culture, its own history, its own specific pressures. The trailer suggests he will make a technically accomplished film. The question underlying this whole sequence is whether competence at replication is the same as understanding what made the original matter. It is not.

When you watch someone execute a formula well, it feels like understanding. You mistake craft for insight. But understanding the assignment in Ferrara's case meant recognizing that you cannot transplant transgression between continents and decades and have it mean the same thing. It means admitting the first film was unrepeatable because it emerged from an unrepeatable moment. If Miike has actually understood that, his film will not look like a Bad Lieutenant remake at all.