‘American Yakuza’ is finding a new audience 32 years later
A new streaming audience is rediscovering one of Viggo Mortensen's deepest cuts—and revealing why it deserves a second look
Viggo Mortensen stars as an undercover FBI agent in 1994's "American Yakuza."
Still frame from "American Yakuza"
Words by Andy Crump
We all know Viggo Mortensen as the king of Gondor, but he deserves fealty as the king of deep cuts as well. For every known quantity in his filmography, a’la G.I. Jane (1997) and Boiling Point (1993), there’s a fistful of random titles you’ve either never heard of or just put out of your memory, like Fresh Horses (1988) and Ruby Cairo (1992). The man is a veritable treasure trove of great roles and obscure ones, consequent to his late-stage fame. Mortensen didn’t become Viggo, Movie Star, until Stuart Townsend kindly passed on playing Aragorn—Ranger of the North, Isildur’s heir, and friend to hobbits—in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-3).
His prior work was, and frankly still is (if to a lesser extent), treated as one big footnote, which feels like a fumble given that his prior work provides occasional blueprints for his post-Rings career. Take Frank Capello’s American Yakuza (1994), in which Mortensen plays an undercover FBI agent—real name David Brandt, pseudonym Nick Davis—whose assignment brings him into employment with the Yakuza, a hazard of the job. The film’s title is the definition of “does what it says on the tin.” David is American; he’s in the Yakuza. Simple. Elegant. It’s also one of the most streamed films on JoySauce TV, where it appears to have found a new audience after languishing in the obscure reaches of Mortenson’s body of work.
That audiences are digging American Yakuza out of relegation comes as somewhat of a surprise, though not unwelcome. We’re experiencing a new cultural East-meets-West moment in popular culture, which the film’s viewership neatly ties into. KPop Demon Hunters has introduced Gen Alpha to Asian pop music and animation; Beef’s second season jets its cast all the way from Colorado to South Korea; The White Lotus’ first and third seasons inflict oblivious whiteness upon Asian and Pacific Islander cultures and settings, being Hawaii and Thailand. (What a mercy that the fourth will follow the second’s lead with a European location.) If American Yakuza is an unexpected beneficiary of that trend, it at least gives us a reason to make fresh insights into Mortensen’s idiosyncratic career.
It goes without saying that Mortensen is the most interesting component of American Yakuza save for Ryo Ishibashi, co-starring as Shuji, a leader in the Tendo crime family who David/Nick is meant to help bring to justice. A gunfight in a warehouse at the start of the movie sees David save Shuji, a gesture that first leads to Shuji hiring him as extra muscle, then later inducting him into the Yakuza. Inevitably, the brotherly bond that forms between David and Shuji, not to mention David’s obligatory hot romance with Shuji’s goddaughter, Yuko (Anzu Lawson), leads David to question his loyalties. One gets the sense that writers Max Strom and John Allen Nelson time traveled to 1999 to lift chunks of the Chow Yun-fat and Mark Wahlberg vehicle, The Corruptor, for their script.
Regrettably, we don’t have that technology yet. On the plus side, we do have a record of East-meets-West movies smattered throughout the early 1990s, like American Samurai (1992) and Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991), both of which are considerably sillier than American Yakuza as straightforward action movies; the point of them is to arrange men on screen so they can beat the tobacco juice out of each other. Comparatively, American Yakuza takes itself seriously with a capital “S,” never fully embracing the cheese factor of an organization as strict and tight-knit as the Yakuza accepting a gaijin as a soldier in a brewing turf war with the Los Angeles Mafia.
Ultimately, the film is about the difficulties men face in making friendships when they’re saddled with proscriptions about duty, honor, and other tropes tied to manliness. At the same time, it’s a fish-out-of-water culture clash that predates Mortensen’s performance in Green Book, Peter Farrelly’s 2018 fraud upon the moviegoing public—essentially, Not All White People: The Movie, an appalling exercise in historical revisionism written by open Islamophobe Nick Vallelonga for the sake of shining up his father, the actor Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, as an unsung civil rights champion. Mortensen plays Tony as a boorish man whose casual racism is excused merely as a product of not knowing any Black people. Maybe that part’s true. What isn’t is that he became lifelong pals with the jazz pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) while serving as his driver-cum-bodyguard on a concert tour through the American Midwest and Deep South.
Green Book, like American Yakuza, asks Mortensen’s character to observe a culture other than his own, and in that capacity also making offhandedly ignorant comments about that culture. “I’m more Black than you are!” Tony claims during an argument with Don, his proof being that without Tony’s guidance, Don wouldn’t know the pleasures of fried chicken, as if fried chicken is as intrinsic to Black American identity as folding a pizza in half and housing the whole thing, as Tony does, is intrinsic to Italian American identity. It’s a conflation Green Book makes that American Yakuza avoids. David/Nick remarks, “I thought you guys ate sitting on the floor or something,” when invited to a meal at Shuji’s home.
It’s a bitter amusement that a film 24 years older than Green Book is shrewd enough to couch its white character’s prejudice in that character instead of the story’s fabric. Maybe that’s another reason why audiences have come around on American Yakuza: the movie isn’t without sin, being guilty of such contemporarily categorized faux pas as fridging, but Capello, Strom, and Nelson understand the difference between David (or, as it were, Nick) being ignorant, and the writing being ignorant. There is some pleasure to take in David/Nick’s performance of coarse obliviousness to unfamiliar customs. The greatest pleasure, though, is Mortensen himself, back when he was a baby-faced actor on the scene instead of generational acting royalty.
Published on July 23, 2026
Words by Andy Crump
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers movies, beer, music, fatherhood, and way too many other subjects for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours: Paste Magazine, Inverse, The New York Times, Hop Culture, Polygon, and Men's Health, plus more. You can follow him on Bluesky and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer.