Giri/Haji shows what Tokyo Vice could've been

Vulture

"In the end, I found Tokyo Vice to be aggressively mediocre. After an enticing opening half that slowly luxuriated in its ’90s-era Tokyo setting, the season disintegrated under the weight of its cascading plot threads, splayed in endless directions and mostly left unresolved," says Nicholas Quah, adding: "Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching Tokyo Vice. And to be fair, that has more to do with my personal fondness for Yakuza crime dramas than anything else; the HBO Max series does make me wish we’d get more of them in this age of streaming abundance. More than anything, though, it made me wish for more seasons of Giri/Haji, the criminally underrated 2019 British-Japanese gangster drama that, sadly, only ran for eight episodes....And not unlike Tokyo Vice, Giri/Haji sets the table by laying down a dizzying number of narrative threads. But where the former ends up unwieldy and nihilistic — owing to the noir tradition, perhaps — Giri/Haji tightly constructs a universe in which everything matters."