‘Old School’: A sloppy fun time in the criminal underworld

When an actor accustomed to playing support parts gets to take the lead, it can be a glorious thing to behold. With his long, lean face and rangy physique, Yukiya Kitamura has seldom wanted for screen work, but he had to wait until his 40s before he started landing main roles.

Maybe it’s because he’s improved with age. Now 48 and increasingly craggy, he’s a perfect fit for Kotaro Ikawa’s film noir throwback, “Old School.” Kitamura plays Shinjiro Renjo, a private eye with a taste for booze and gambling who’s first seen drunkenly trashing an underground poker game before passing out.

This Bacchic rampage puts him in debt to the local yakuza, who ask him to make amends by finding the perpetrator behind a recent arson attack on their office. Meanwhile, Shinjiro is approached by a hostess of Filipino descent, Michiko Garcia (Iriya Take), who wants him to investigate the sudden disappearance of her friend, a Kurdish asylum seeker.

Unsurprisingly, the two cases end up intersecting while our sozzled sleuth also finds himself caught in the middle of a turf war between the yakuza and rival Chinese gangsters, who are led by the impressively mustached Chen (Kentaro Furuyama).

The story’s beats (and beatdowns) are mostly familiar, but part of the fun in “Old School” is seeing how it reconciles genre conventions with contemporary realities. It’s set in a Japan that’s both more ethnically diverse and more sanitized than the one seen in the 1960s and 1970s pulp detective pics to which the film pays winking homage.

Forget the omnipotent yakuza that still get trotted out in Hollywood depictions of Japan such as “Bullet Train.” As one character comments, today’s gangsters are so hemmed in by legal restrictions, they have to make their money selling bubble tea.

As a regular voyager through the criminal underworld, Shinjiro realizes that his days are also numbered (hence the film’s Japanese title, which translates as “Doomsday Detective”). This is a guy who seems more uncomfortable having to sing a karaoke duet in a hostess bar than when having his life threatened. If all the other lowlifes disappear, there’ll be no place for him either.

Frequently sporting Band-Aids and head bandages, Kitamura injects the film with an air of hard-lived experience that the writing sometimes lacks. Futoshi Nakano’s screenplay is a little too eager to signal its political bona fides, spelling out the big issues without always finding a natural place for them in the story. (Michiko’s lecture about the iniquities of the immigration system is a case in point.)

Then again, maybe that’s asking too much from an 80-minute genre flick that doesn’t make any claims to greatness. Even when it’s chafing against obvious budget restrictions, “Old School” mostly succeeds at what it sets out to do: It’s pacy, hard-bitten and cynically humorous, with a bitter finish and wickedly slapstick punchline.

The film shares some inspirations with cult anime series “Cowboy Bebop,” and it’s tempting to imagine what the latter’s disappointing 2021 Netflix adaptation might have been like with Kitamura in the lead. He has just the right balance of grizzled charisma and quicksilver energy, displaying the full extent of his physicality in a stupendous set-piece that must rank as one of this year’s finest screen brawls. It’s certainly one of the sloppiest.