Product Description

A yakuza of chinese descent and a japanese cop each wage their own war against the japanese mafia. But they are destined to meet. Their encounter will change the world. Studio: Kino International Release Date: 10/05/2004 Run time: 105 minutes Rating: Ur

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45272 in DVD
• Brand: Kino Video
• Released on: 2003-05-27
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Japanese
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 105 minutes

Amazon.com
The director of Dead or Alive, Takashi Miike, made his name on the international scene with Audition, a chilling psychological thriller that builds from a quiet start towards a prolonged torture sequence almost too unbearable to watch. But such deliberate pacing isn't typical of Miike, whose movies often assault the viewer with an onslaught of slam-bang action that makes John Woo look like Eric Rohmer. Dead or Alive, his most successful cops-vs-yakuza thriller to date, kicks off with six nonstop minutes of machine gun-paced violence, sex, and slaughter, all set to a pounding heavy-metal beat. Thereafter things calm down a little, though not much. Given Miike's penchant for murky, livid-toned visuals and skewed camera angles, it's not always too easy to work out exactly who's doing what to whom, but the general outline's clear enough. The Tokyo underworld is being torn apart by a turf war between the yakuza gangs and the invading Chinese triads. Ambitious yakuza member Ryuichi (Riki Takeuchi) isn't above playing both sides off against each other in his bid for power, while police detective Jojima (Sho Aikawa), himself none too scrupulous in his methods, is out to destroy the gangs.

Into this conventional plot framework Miike piles enough warped characters and bizarre, twisted happenings to fuel half-a-dozen Tarantino movies, while cheerfully borrowing--and inflating--key moments from such hard-boiled gangster-noirs as The Big Heat and Kiss Me Deadly. One character deep-fries his own hand, a stripper is drowned in a paddling-pool filled with her own excrement, and the literally apocalyptic finale, the showdown to end all showdowns, will leave you gasping. The appallingly prolific Miike, who regularly makes about five movies a year, has since directed two sequels--the first only three months after the original. --Philip Kemp

Customer Reviews

Flabbergasting!
The first and last five minutes of DEAD OR ALIVE are truly you-hadda-be-there experiences... and the ending.... well, the ending isn't just over-the-top, it's fall-off-a-cliff-and-no-bottom-to-hit.

This overheated crime noir is the brainchild of Takashi Miike, Japan's answer to Ken Russell and Quentin Tarantino rolled into one, a workaholic who in only a decade has something like forty-five films to his name. Here he pits the sneering Riki Takeuchi against the cool-eyed Sho Aikawa (both direct-to-video crime-movie stars in Japan), with the former being a yakuza with ambitions to ace everyone else out and the latter being a vice cop obsessed with squeezing him to pay for his daughters operation. The two ooze through Japan's underworld, where stomachs full of ramen noodles are blown all over the camera lens and you're as likely to die of being drowned in a wading pool of excrement as you are being shotgunned at your birthday party while in a stork suit.

What makes Miike more than just an exploitationist is his unusual attention to character and incident. Beyond and above the noise and splatter of his images, there are real people on screen here: Takeuchi's criminal is so hardened that he can't even hear the cries of despair from the younger brother he allegedly did so much of this for, and Aikawa's cop is so estranged from his family, he's almost going through the motions of trying to save them. Then both of them are jarred into action by circumstances, and that leads to the showdown I mentioned above. Which REALLY has to be seen to be believed... or disbelieved.

There are two other DOA movies, but interestingly, they have no common elements except a) crime and b) the presence of the two leads. Call them "side-quels," if you will, and here's hoping the rest of them find their way to the USA sooner rather than later...

Oh yeah!
All I can say about Takashi Miike is "Thank God!" O.k., I can and will say more about him than that, but those two words will probably sum up your impressions of the man's film work. You groaned in abject horror over the horrific, piano wire denouement of "Audition." You swore off drinking milk and nearly lost your lunch over the warped portrayal of domesticity gone wrong in "Visitor Q." You couldn't do much of anything except sit in open-mouthed awe during the string of grotesque oddities that constituted "Ichi the Killer." And now you're about to embark on an intriguing exploration of the world of the Yakuza in "Dead or Alive." Welcome to the depraved world of Japanese auteur Takashi Miike. Anyone remotely familiar with the peculiar institution of Japanese filmmaking probably knows about this director by now. If not, you're missing out on something quite amazing. I won't say you will understand everything you see in a Miike opus; watching one of his films through western eyes is bound to cause a serious case of severe cultural dissonance. But that doesn't mean you won't have one heck of a time trying to figure it all out.

The first ten or so minutes of "Dead or Alive" slightly misleads the viewer. Through a series of quick cuts, pounding rock music, and extremely violent imagery Miike sets you up for a sit on the edge of your seat thriller. You've got a woman taking a nosedive out of a building, a nauseating encounter in a bathroom, a guy scarfing down bowl after bowl of noodles, exotic dancers gyrating in the background, and a gang gunning down a bunch of mobsters. What does it all mean? It's Miike's way of not just grabbing your attention, but slapping you silly until you simply MUST pay attention. It turns out that Ryuuichi (Riki Takeuchi) and his band of merry pranksters bears the responsibility for most of this violence. He's a Japanese guy born in China which, in the social hierarchy of Japan, means he's nothing. That also means he's got nothing to lose by starting a war between the Japanese Yakuza and the Chinese Triads in Yokohama as a means to take over the drug trade. Unfortunately for the gangster, the stoic and meticulous Detective Jojima (Sho Aikawa) is hot on his trail. It's a showdown between two obstinate souls that threatens to turn the streets red with blood.

Miike does an interesting thing after the initial mayhem runs its course; he slows the movie down to a snail's pace. Sandwiched between the slam-bang opening and the insane showdown at the end, "Dead or Alive" focuses on telling the personal stories of these two men. Miike doesn't leave us completely out to dry, of course, as he gives us plenty of disgusting weirdness to tide us over in the meantime. One of the goons in the film gets his kicks by hiring harridans to wallow in a wading pool filled with...well, watch and see. We also meet one of Jojima's informants, a man involved in filming...well, watch and see. Geez, I can't mention any of the over the top cringe elements in "Dead or Alive"! But I can talk about Jojima and Ryuuichi. The police officer's job is his reason for being as he loves to make the streets safer for society, but his family life drifts as a result. He doesn't communicate well with his wife or his offspring. Worse, his daughter is very sick and needs an enormously expensive operation, an operation so pricey that it will force the cop to take desperate measures to save her life. As for Ryuuichi, his existence as a non-Japanese Japanese, so to speak, ensures that he will always live on the fringes of society. His relationship with a smart younger brother interested in school threatens to implode when the boy discovers what Ryuuichi does for a living.

The final scenes of "Dead or Alive" take the film in an entirely different direction that definitely made me smile (check out that car dropping out of the sky), but found me scratching my head in wonderment. Really, folks--you simply won't believe how the movie ends. It's so over the top that it outdoes nearly every other over the top conclusion in cinematic history. How did the conflict suddenly assume global implications? Perhaps Miike is making a statement about good versus evil? Whatever the case, I thoroughly enjoyed the film. I thought both of the primary actors (Aikawa and Takeuchi) did a fine job in what is essentially a low budget action flick. It must have been difficult to create sympathetic characters in a film featuring some of the sick stuff we see here, but Miike and his actors accomplish that very thing. Two sequels to this film arrived on the scene shortly after, neither of which I have seen yet. Based on my experiences with the first installment, the other two ought to be massively entertaining.

Surprisingly, you get more than a few extras on the "Dead or Alive" disc. There are the typical trailers for this film and a few others, production notes, and an interview with Miike. I liked this little discussion because we hear the director talk about the popularity of the two leads cast in the film. Apparently, Sho Aikawa and Riki Takeuchi are quite popular in their native Japan. Miike wanted to play on that popularity with the film, not necessarily in a monetary sense (although that was definitely a consideration), but in how the two men played their roles. Takashi Miike makes anywhere from five to ten films a year, as amazing as that sounds, and "Dead or Alive" is one of the best ones I've seen from him. Give it a shot if you've got the stomach for it.

Japanese insanity
Since so much has been written about Takashi Miike, it's proven to be a bit of a challenge to view his work without any preconceived notions about it. I actually intended to watch "Audition" first, but the subtitles on the DVD
I bought didn't work, so I wound up with a rented copy of "Dead or Alive" instead. Anyway, so many things have been said about this guy, and his brilliant style, and his penchant for crazed spurts of violence, that I watched this whole movie on the edge of my recliner anticipating the expected carnage. While there was plenty of blood spilled, "Dead or Alive" turned out to be more than the average action flick, with a lot to offer even when not rocketing ahead at the speed of a bullet. Not only is this a great action movie, but it's also a damn fine movie, period.

The opening scene is every bit as visceral and thrilling as the reviews have said, incorporating sex, drugs, rock and roll, and of course lots and lots of nasty violence. Once all that's out of the way, Miike gets down to the actual story, which should be pretty familiar to anyone who's watched a few American cops-and- robbers movies. The movie largely revolves around the
exploits of a ruthless gangster named Ryuichi navigating the complex web of the Tokyo underworld, and a relentless cop, Jojima, determined to bring him down. Both make lots of steely glares and do their share of nasty things throughout the movie, as they deal with a strange combination of professional and family problems. It turns out Jojima needs twenty million
yen to get his daughter an operation, and Ryuichi has a brother who doesn't exactly approve of his career choice. In other words, these guys are both compromised in their respective undertakings, and that fact weighs heavily on everything that happens.

I'll readily admit the plot can get a bit convoluted, but the movie is more notable for its downcast mood and impressive visuals. While occasionally somewhat shallow, Miike's stylish direction helps bring life to his solemn tale of a morally compromised cop and gangster living on the edge. Yes,
this sort of story has been told plenty of times before, but "Dead or Alive" still manages to elevate itself above the plain thanks to its stark characterization and mind-warping ultra-violence. The action sequences are somewhat in the vein of John Woo's, but with more of an absurdist tone; I've never watched a John Woo scene that involved a closeup of noodles being blasted out of a guy's stomach, or a guy accidentally deep-frying his own hand, or a guy in a chicken suit being cut down by machine-gun fire. There have been plenty of cool action set pieces shot throughout film history, but few have left me shaking my head wondering what just happened the way some of the ones here did.

It all comes to a head with the powerhouse conclusion, which epitomizes everything this movie is about: it's chaotic, it's unpredictable, and it's extremely violent. While it's not perfect by any means, it's hard to deny that "Dead or Alive" is one interesting movie. Films pitting cops against gangsters are certainly nothing new, but Miike throws in enough bizarre and surreal elements to mark himself as a director doing something different. If (like me) you're a John Woo enthusiast looking for an alternative to watching "The Killer" or "Hard Boiled" yet again, you could do a lot worse.