Watch Dead or Alive: Final For Free

Wonderful Movie

Memorable, crazy movie

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Dead or Alive: Final, the movie that supposedly brings together the three films in the very loose Dead or Alive trilogy, and connected mostly by its stars, Riki Takeiuchi and Sho Aikawa and that each film has its share of bizarro-world fixtures and neuroses and heaps of violence, is admittedly the weakest of the lot. That none of the three films ends up being a disappointment is less a testament to the creativity of the material but to the pound-for-pound guts that director Takashi Miike takes with the surroundings and the material. Here he presents an overtly dystopian future, however low-key, where a homosexual mayor/dictator (Richard Chen) has the entire village drugged except for a group of rebels. There's also replicants- robots- in this year of 2346, one of them is Ryo (Aikawa), a robot of complete lethal skill but also with the capacity to love and learn and so forth. Then a cop, Takeshi (Takeiuchi) happens to be the mayor's top guard. But things start to unravel on both sides, Ryo teaming up with the rebels and Takeshi with his employer, though blood-soaked mishaps like a hostage trade-off gone bad, and with Takeshi finding out his wife and son are robots (not done in an Alien mood, mind you, just suddenly as if in a the power went out), and that he himself is one as well. And it all leads up to one last, inexplicable showdown between the two men.Strange that there's yet another film where Miike has peaks and valleys here, sometimes finding that middle ground of success where science fiction can have some meaning to it. But there really isn't anything to take from this story, except that the mayor/dictator is a dingbat with no back-story who gets his rocks off making sure his drug stops couples from getting pregnant and that everything remains under control. He also has along with him his love slave, I'd guess, in the hilarious non-speaking part of a saxophone player who also doubles sometimes as a human fixture when not plugging away the moody blues. Meanwhile, we get the conventional sides to Ryo and Takeshi's stories, and they're never uninteresting, just not totally convincing enough to hold interest. Of course Miike isn't above having some fun, like when Takeshi plops Michelle (Maria Chen) in to the water to get her to swim after a near-assassination attempt on the mayor, or in having the original rebel leader speaking English for no good reason at all. There's even a playful homage to old sci-fi cartoons at the start of the film. But there's nothing very compelling substance-wise, with the exception of Takeshi's minor turns at becoming "good" midway through the film (helping one couple get by with clearance to have a kid), and mostly Miike's strengths this time are purely stylistically and in the choice of locations and sets.It's like a grungy Japanese Alphaville where everything still has a contemporary feel through all of the special effects. And I really liked the yellow-green tint Miike used through the movie, as it impacted very well in outdoor scenes and added just enough grittiness in the indoor scenes. But as for peaks and valleys, one sees this ever more clearly- and the sci-fi movie channel level of visual effects, with maybe a few more dollars put into it- during the climax. This contains some of the funniest material in the most delirious, Freudian sensibility from the director, even if it has to get started by unbearable contrivance; the way that Ryo and Takeshi finally meet up is sort of random and just a means for the producers to try and cheaply tie together the past two films, when it wasn't needed. On the other hand, in terms of the sheer guilty entertainment value of a flick like Miike's where one sees something totally unexpected and very crudely sexual, it ranks right up there with the best scenes in Happiness of the Katakuris and Visitor Q. Overall, Dead or Alive: Final is a cheesy 90 minute effort that doesn't take itself TOO seriously, and is better off all the more for its wicked contrivances, militaristic decay and cultural hang-ups put on pulp-level display.

In the last of a trilogy, Riki Takeuchi and Sho Aikawa are once again on the opposite ends of the spectrum, as they were in the first DOA, after being the best of friends in the second one. Riki is a cop searching for his son being held by a gang whom drifter Sho is a part of. Even though, if you think about it and put yourself in Miike's flow of logic, this ending film is inevitable in it's actions, it's still the less of the three. Of course no Takashi Miike film is totally without merit and such is the case here. There are a few setpeices that make it worthwhile, but the poetry I usually find in a Miike film is not found here (at least in the amounts that I usually expect from this director) My Grade: C-

I'm so honored to see I'm one of the 3 women who have rated DOA: Final on the IMDb that I feel compelled to comment. Look, Ma, I'm an arcane-trash-cinema hound! Yippee! Right. Having seen all three DOA films in one evening at a triple-feature (this is what happens when you live in a small French city and only one cinema in town shows subtitled films), I'm in a terrific mood, because the movies were tons of fun. More fun than I'd been expecting, because Miike films seem to come accompanied with user comments like "Don't bring a girl to this." Thanks, guys. Anyway, DOA: Final is, sadly, easily the weakest of the trilogy. After DOA 1, which is a nutso, gutsy genre-jumping yakuza tale, and DOA 2, which pretends to be a yakuza tale for ten minutes and then turns into a Wim Wenders film (and a good one too), this last entry apparently wants to be science fiction. But, alas, it just can't cut the mustard.Sho Aikawa is the bright point -- as effortlessly, unclassifiably entertaining here as he is in the first two DOAs. With his bad bleach job, crackily teenage voice, tracksuit and sneakers, and zen spaciness, he's as counterintuitive and appealing as you'd expect in his role as a battle cyborg, or "replicant," named Ryo. If I could just watch him hang out with nine-year-olds for two hours, that might be worth the admission price. But even a blond Sho Aikawa is no Rutger Hauer, and he can't make this film work.The SF premise is of the most worn-out sort -- an authority figure is making people take anti-fertility drugs to stop them having children. Oh, no! The all-business, authoritarian hand of the state is placed in opposition to the natural world of human instinct, family bonds and lush jungle backdrops! That's enough to make a sci-fi movie, right? Throwing in a band of sex-friendly "rebels" doesn't help: Terence Yin and Maria Chen seem to have been cast more for their attractively Eurasian features and ability to look good in camos than for their acting talent. Admittedly, it's a tough trick to shuttle between three languages, but Yin's "acting" in English is just wince-worthy, and Chen isn't convincing even when she doesn't speak.The pompadoured Riki Takeuchi is fun, as always, here in the role of a police chief caught in a moral dilemma about whether to enforce his boss's orders. But returning to that SF premise, we have the problem of an unaddressed: WHY? What's the motivating engine behind all this evil-drug, Mad-Max-type-rebellion, anti-family stuff? Miike's very hand-wavy about this -- "It's an overpopulation thing" -- but, and this is the bad part, he's none too subtle about suggesting the bad-guy mayor's obvious homosexuality has a lot to do with it. Thanks, Takashi Miike! I guess homosexuals really are the ultimate threat to the survival of humanity, huh? I mean, come on, this crap went out with "Dune." Watch Miike associate homosexuality with pedophilia, decadence, pastel scarves and -- a sign of true evil -- saxophone concerts, in order to see why this movie has to get a three-point deduction for catastrophic moronicity.This is the only one of the three DOA films I wouldn't see again. It's not without its bright spots, but there are far too many negatives to make it hold together. In the little quality meter in my head, I was rating it as low as a 4/10, right up until the final five minutes. Then I started laughing my head off. The bizarreness of Miike's wrap-up pushes the whole experience up to a 5/10. But, you know, if an out-of-left-field conclusion improves the filmic experience, you can be pretty sure there's something wrong with the movie to begin with. Unfortunately, in this case there's quite a lot.

Out of the three in the trilogy, I'd say this is the second strongest. It starts with some very amazing action, but goes downhill from there. Thematically it's similar to the previous films, but the story and point of the movie get muddled somewhere along the way. The ending is quite nuts, and reminded me of TETSUO. By the way, did you know that the director of TETSUO played Ichi's father figure in Ichi The Killer?