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.