Bayside Shakedown brings a fresh approach to its tale of a big kidnapping case that becomes a contest between cops on the beat and cops among the
elite. With wit and precision, the film explores the inner workings of the Japanese police, including nitty gritty about bureaucratic infighting and career building.
Also, it avoids the usual genre ploys for keeping audience fingernails digging into armrests: There are no explosions, car chases, or villainous corpses that suddenly return from the dead. In fact, the cops are almost comically non-violent types, to whom the sight of a real loony holding a real gun is enough to send an entire station house into a panic. Shooting the loony is, of course, a last resort.
The hero, however, is a real-enough police detective, a thirty-year-old inspector in a sparkling-new Tokyo bayside station. A mid-career hire who once worked for a computer software company, but chafed at the salaryman life, Aoshima Shunsaku (Oda Yuji) now finds the same old same old at his new job, with added layers of rules, bureaucracy and general pettifogging. He is nonetheless romantic enough to want to be a crime-busting cop, not a ladder-climbing careerist.
The low farce of the daily round is interrupted by the discovery of a corpse floating in a nearby river. Soon after a high-ranking police official is kidnapped in broad daylight. What criminal masterminds would be daring - or stupid - enough to pull off such a stunt? This is a obviously a case, not for the lowly local cops, but the elite bureaucrats of the Metropolitan Police, who invade the station house like a dark-suited army. Their leader is the hard-faced Muroi Shinji (Yanagiba Toshiro), who may be infinitely above Aoshima in status, but remains faithful to a promise they once made as brother cops: Aoshima would battle it out on the street and Muroi would support him from the bureaucratic trenches.
Aoshima needs that support when he and others not content to be water boys (and girls) for the Metro cops begin to investigate on their own.This is heresy to the more obtuse among the higher ups, who dismiss ideas not in their manuals. The battle, we see, is not between bad guys and good guys so much as between different concepts of what it means to be a cop.
Bayside Shakedown does not paint this conflict in overly simplistic shades, while not going to the other, typically Japanese, extreme of endowing even the bad guys with hearts of gold. And while being precise and detailed (if occasionally absurd), it is never preachy or dull. The most popular Japanese film of 1998 is, both as an entertainment and an essay on the Japanese organizational mind, among the most satisfying.
Mark Schilling