Without a home and feeling no obligation to Japanese society or Yakuza, Ryuichi (Takeuchi Riki) and his small group decide to make their own place by trying to take over the Shinjuku underworld and the drug trade from Taiwan. As they plan an all-out-assault on the remaining Chinese and Japanese mafia kings, only Detective Jojima (Aikawa Sho) stands between them and complete domination.
(39 votes)
2.
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
(40 votes)
3.
After a rapid-fire montage of two groups of gangsters, one Japanese, the other ethnic Chinese, killing each other and everybody else on screen, DEAD OR ALIVE's story begins when a police officer announces, "Round up everybody who looks (suspicious), even if they aren't Chinese." The Chinese have been living in Japan for centuries, but have never been accepted or integrated into Japanese society. This larger conflict underlies the blood and gore of the two gangs vying to make a big drug purchase from a mainland Chinese gang. When Jojima (Show Aikawa) an otherwise honest cop, needs money for an operation for his daughter, he gets a "loan" from the head of the Japanese gang, but when his partner kills the brother of the leader of the Chinese mafia, Ryuichi (Riki Rakeuchi), a blood feud begins between the two men.
DEAD OR ALIVE's fast-paced cinematic presentation, black humor, tongue-in-cheek satire, and misogynist sadism set it apart from similar films by Takeshi Kitano. Director Takashi Miike's earlier film, AUDITION, is known for its stunning ending, but here he builds up to a parody of the big showdown that is so hysterically comic that, borrowing from Monty Python and DR. STRANGELOVE, it reaches absolutely apocalyptic proportions.
(35 votes)
4.
A daring exercise in ultra-violent extremes
A prostitute plunges to her death clutching a bag of drugs, a furtive men's room tryst climaxes in a geyser of blood, an after-dinner shotgun blast graphically puts a new spin on bulimia, a stripper writhes, a mysterious knife thrower takes aim and a gangster snorts a line of white powder stretching to infinity...and that's merely the first ten minutes. From Taskashi Miike (Audition,Ichi the Killer), "one of the most exciting, versatile directors working today" (NY Post), comes a film of such kaleidoscopic mayhem and frenzied violence that it defies hyperbole. Burlesquing and surpassing every other full-bore, double-barreled Asian crime thriller, Dead Or Alive conjures up a harrowing urban fever-dream where "the images are so astonishing, you'll feel you inhaled them." (SF Examiner)
In Tokyo's crime ridden Shinjuku district, emotionally and financially bankrupt Detective Jojima (Show Aikawa) plays referee in a gangland turf war pitting the Japanese Yakuza Mafia against a bloodthirsty band of Chinese immigrant gangsters. But Jojima's obligation to his terminally ill daughter and ruthless Chinese mobster Ryuichi's (Riki Takeuchi) sentimental devotion to his ersatz family of misfit assassins threatens to add their own corpses to the landslide of fresh bodies littering Tokyo. Miike depicts Dead Or Alive's gruesome acts of excess and debasement with shockingly graphic relish, allowing his vision to escalate beyond even a cartoonish level of audacity.
(34 votes)
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