Eiji Uchida loses the rhythm with ‘Offbeat Cops’

Policing ain’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when you could get away with bending rules as long as you got results. Now it’s all “compliance” this, “due process” that.

Tsukasa Naruse (Hiroshi Abe), the protagonist of Eiji Uchida’s “Offbeat Cops,” is having none of it. He’s a veteran detective so old-school, it’s like he’s been cryogenically frozen since the 1970s: the kind of macho jerk who reads a newspaper during police briefings, clashes constantly with his colleagues and thinks nothing of bashing a few heads (including his own) in the course of a day’s work.

When a gang starts targeting elderly people in phone-scam robberies, Tsukasa is convinced he knows who’s behind the operation. But his heavy-handed attempt to extract information from a suspect gets him hauled in front of the brass and promptly reassigned — to play drums with the police band.

After 30 years on the force, Tsukasa finds himself slumming it at a rural outpost, where a motley crew of musicians uses a church as their rehearsal space. Naturally, he doesn’t take long to antagonize them all, including trumpeter Haruko (Nana Seino) — a music school graduate and single mother — and saxophonist Yuji (Mahiro Takasugi), who’s still sore that his own ambitions to become a detective didn’t work out.

Will our splenetic sleuth learn to get along with his bandmates while making prodigious progress on his instrument? Will he also patch up his relationship with estranged teenage daughter Noriko (Ai Mikami), make amends with former sidekick Shota (Hayato Isomura) and play a crucial role in the investigation from which he was so ignominiously dropped? You betcha.

Despite the odd quirky detail, “Offbeat Cops” doesn’t deviate much from an overfamiliar score. Blending a rote musical underdog story with a procedural drama, Uchida’s screenplay ends up doing neither particularly well. The plotting manages to be both predictable and slapdash, while Tsukasa’s rehabilitation has all the narrative thrust of a workplace harassment training video.

It’s the kind of role that Arnold Schwarzenegger played when he transitioned from straight-up action to self-parody in the 1990s. Yet Abe doesn’t have such a well-defined screen persona to subvert. The actor has done his fair share of dramas and comedies over the years; Tsukasa’s abrupt transition from bad cop to good cop just feels like he’s exchanging one schtick for another.

Working with the same creative team behind his Japan Academy prize-winning transgender drama, “Midnight Swan” (2020), Uchida has at least crafted a film that looks good. Maki Ito’s cinematography captures the musical sequences with real gusto, her camera swooping and swerving around the ensemble — who, to their credit, are actually playing their own instruments.

Yet there’s something a bit disconcerting about the eagerness with which the director — hitherto a reliable champion of society’s outcasts — embraces his role as police propagandist. His script is awfully warm and fuzzy about the fuzz: The story’s only real source of tension is in whether police musicians deserve the same respect as their fellow cops.

The film answers this during a denouement that’s as cheesy as anything the “Bayside Shakedown” series managed to muster. But when Tsukasa and company play their final number, it isn’t the big showstopper the movie needed. Like “Offbeat Cops” as a whole, it just rings hollow.