1999, Japan. Starring Sho Aikawa, Riki Takeuchi, Ren Osugi, Tomorowo Taguchi, Hitoshi Ozawa, Susumu Terajima, Renji Ishibashi, Shingo Tsurumi, Kaoru Sugita. Directed by Takashi Miike. Available on DVD (HKFlix).

The first five minutes of Takashi Miike's ground-breaking, outrageously over-the-top yakuza film Dead or Alive contains more hard-hitting coolness, blood, and sleaze than any ten action films you can name. In an opening montage set to a screeching distorted rock tune, you get suicide, a guy snorting a thirty foot long line of coke, a guy eating buckets of ramen only to get shot in the belly and have all the noodles explode out of his body, two guys screwing in a dirty bathroom until one gets beheaded and the other laps up the squirting blood not realizing it isn't the bodily fluid he thinks it is, a sexy grinding stripper, tongue waggling, motorcycle riding, grenades, machine guns, pump action shotguns hidden in clown statues, and murders galore. I'm pretty sure I left a lot out, but you get the general idea.

Most directors couldn't or wouldn't even dream of cramming this much madness into a whole movie, let alone the first few minutes. After all, how can you sustain yourself after an opening that puts the action content of most action films to shame? One thing's for damn sure, Dead Or Alive is going to give us one hell of a ride as we find out.

For those unfamiliar with the man, Miike is one of the most prolific, talented, sick, and controversial directors to come out of Japan since. well, ever. He first caught the eye of the cult film community with the release of his gloriously grueling yakuza gorefest Fudoh: The New Generation. Since then, he has moved forward like a relentless machine, making movies that fall all over the spectrum. There are slowburn suspense thrillers that explode in the final minutes into orgies of depraved violence (Audition). There are "family comedies" that feature such delightful elements as a necropheliac man obsessed with his teen hooker daughter and his wife who just can't get enough of making her own breasts squirt milk all over the house (Visitor Q). There are wild but comparatively tame action farces featuring Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon spoofs done during a cockfight (City of Lost Souls).

And believe it or not, the guy even has a few cute teenie-bopper and touching adventure films to his name (Andromedia and Bird People of China). Say what you will about the man, but if nothing else, he's intent on proving that he's more than a one-trick pony who relies on over-the-top gore and completely tasteless sleaze to make a name for himself, not that those things have hurt him in the eyes of anyone but Japanese ratings boards and most of the sane movie-going public.

With so much going on, much of it often disgusting and offensive, it's easy to fail to notice that, above all else, the guy is fabulously talented. Witness Dead or Alive's out of control opening montage as an example. Expertly edited, franticly paced, superbly shot, and just plain cool beyond words, not since John Woo in his late 1980s prime has there been a film with so strong an opening. Feeling almost like you're watching a preview rather than part of the actual film, these first few minutes will make you want to stick around for the rest, guaranteed, if for no other reason than to see if the movie can top sexy, sweaty strippers and a guy with a bunch of ramen noodles exploding out of his stomach.

Not being one to take the easy route, Miike shocks everyone further by not even bothering to try and top the opening. Once the initial insanity is over, Dead or Alive settles into a fairly conventionally paced Japanese yakuza film, which is the polite way of saying it's pretty slow - but not necessarily dull as a result. Heck, only in a Miike film can blowjobs, car bombs, bestiality, and a woman drowned in a kiddy pool of her own feces be considered conventional. Those disgusting sidesteps - which are more absurd than they are offensive - are just one of the many ways Miike keeps you aware of the fact that despite outward appearances, this is hardly yakuza business as usual.

After the explosive opening sequence, our action picks up (or rather, slows down, just to mess with you) with opposite sides of the same coin. Hotshot yakuza thug Ryu (Riki Takeuchi) is looking to make a big move in the underworld that involves robbery and setting off a turf war between the local Japanese Yakuza and Chinese Triad societies. Complicating his ruthlessness is a straight-arrow younger brother just back from college in America - an academic career he later discovers was financed by his brother's illicit activities. Ryu and his gang are a curious bunch, the offspring of Japanese people raised in China (zanryu koji). They are alienated from both countries and cultures. They have no allegiance to any nation, and no nation seems to want them. Their origins are important to the overall theme of the film, and to a reoccurring theme in much of Miike's richly varied filmography. They are characters torn from their roots, or with no roots in the first place. Dead or Alive sets itself immediately as something more than gross-out action exploitation by dwelling on questions regarding a culture detached from its roots and thus adrift with no real identity.

The other side of the coin is beleaguered cop Jojima (Sho Aikawa), who has been tempted into corruption by the necessity to pay for an expensive operation that can save his daughter's life. Like his nemesis, Jojima's relationship with his younger family member is strained, at best. Like Ryu, Jojima finds himself at odds with his roots, int his case his family, forsaking them in favor of doggedly applying himself to his work. In Jojima we see much of mainstream Japan, obsessed with careers to the exclusion of all else. Like Ryu, he is detached from the things he should care about and, in fact does care about. His care, however, is not deep enough to overcome his addiction to his career, just as Ryu's concern for his younger brother is not deep enough to make him consider leaving the criminal world.

Jojima and Ryu try to outfox one another as the film draws to its inevitably violent conclusion, but the so-called "slow" middle portion actually has quite a lot going for it, much of it very subversive to the gangster genre. For one, there is Ryu. Unlike most of the "killer with a heart of gold" types we've been forced to endure ever since the rest of the world starting doing bad imitations of John Woo, Ryu not only doesn't have a heart of gold, he scarcely has any heart at all. At the same time, his ruthlessness is made comprehensible by the conditions in which he was raised. But he seeks no redemption, does no life-altering soul-searching. He is a product of how he was raised, and he has no interest in altering his being.

Jojima, at the same time, is forced by circumstances to explore the world of corruption, taking a loan from an underworld crime boss in order to save his daughter's life, even though she shows no real gratitude or relief, having written off her workaholic, detached father years ago. As the movie winds its way toward the inevitable final showdown between Ryu and Jojima, it also winds toward a more important and substantial thematic climax - the corruption and eventual destruction of innocence by the evil all around it.

Ryu's brother and Jojima's daughter are ultimately doomed by the darkness in their elders, by the obsession their suppose caretakers possess to the exclusion of seeing much else. For Ryu, it is the conquest of the old guard gangsters. For Jojima, it is the conquest of Ryu. Jojima's daughter has her operation paid for with dirty money, and though innocent, she ultimately pays the price. Likewise, Ryu's younger brother has his college career paid for with Ryu's blood money. Two futures bought by dirty money that ultimately end up being no futures at all.

Ryu and Jojima are equally doomed, and the finale of the film picks the pace up considerably while completely defying easy interpretation. It is, to say the least, apocalyptic, and an utterly mind-bending but appropriate way to end such a nihilistic piece of storytelling. What Miike is attempting to say is anybody's guess. That countries can be destroyed by the out-of-control violence? That national identity is useless anyway? That he just thought this would really screw with people's heads? I'm not Miike, so I can't say for certain. Twist and shock endings are, more times than not, utterly annoying because they fail to shock or twist anything, and merely seemed tacked on because some idiot screenwriter thought it was clever. Horror films have pretty much beat the end-of-the-film zinger into the ground (and still can't seem to get enough of it), but recently a couple Japanese films have shown that it can still be used effectively to not only shock, but completely blow away the viewer. Ring and Versus both had tremendously powerful twist endings, Ring's augmenting the creepiness of the whole movie while Versus' just lets you know that you've been had for slavishly conforming to character expectations and conventions.

Dead or Alive's explosive finale can be called a twist ending, and while it may not make the greatest deal of sense at first, it is so gleefully over the top, so completely absurd, and so wonderfully insane that there's no way not to love it. Rather than deliver some big shoot-out or other scene typical of the genre, Miike takes the film way out into left field with hilarious and confounding results. And upon closer examination, there is a point to it beyond just freaking everyone out. Miike is exploring a world full of self-destructive characters, a world in which everything ha been sacrificed. Within the greater theme of the film, the finale suddenly makes perfect, darkly hilarious sense. Plus it illustrates one of my favorite sayings: you may not be able to fight City Hall, but you can sure as hell blow it up.

Peppering the film are excursions into the perverse underbelly of society, something Miike delights in dragging into the light, sometimes to the detriment of the film. At times sickly humorous (two small time punks trying to wrangle an unruly dog into a sex scene with a girl who obviously couldn't care less one way or the other) and at times just plain disturbing (the gangster who drowns a woman in her own feces), there's no doubt Miike had a purpose in throwing them in, even if the purpose is nothing more than to remind you that you're not watching a normal film. At the same time, some of it is a tad over-indulgent and serves as a distraction when something better attached to the film's plot would have been more effective. I'm well beyond the point of being offended by movies, no matter how far they push the envelope of bad taste, so my objection isn't moral. I guess I just would have preferred more street violence in place of those little forays into perversion. The stripper segments are pretty good, and they have a direct relation to what's going on. A couple of the other things, however, are asides at best, Miike being gross just to be gross. It's not like they harm the film - if nothing else, they certainly contribute to making it more memorable. Dunno. They just seemed sort of silly at times.

Granted, I'm in the minority here in preferring the more straight-forward melodrama and street action to the scenes of people drowning in excrement. Well, I guess I'm in the majority if you look at society as a whole, but definitely in the minority when it come sot fans of the film. It's not like I don't appreciate a good slapstick comedy scene about people having sex with a dog; I just don't find much power in it within the context of a gangster film. I like that it goes a long way to dispell any myth pertaining to the slick glamor of most underworld operations, and I like that it hits you like a lead balloon just as you were thinking you might be watching a normal movie. It's a matter of taste, I suppose. Takeshi Kitano has a similar stylistic approach (and believe me, this is no coincidence, as we'll get to in a minute or two) in that he loves to lull you into a sense of security by making his movie slow and harmless, only to blow your mind when a firestorm of violence comes out of nowhere. I guess I just respond better to violence than I do to sexual perversion, though if I had to chose between the two for my real life, I'd probably flip-flop so long as the perversion is good and fun and involves no animals or kiddy pools full of yesterday's dinner.

The story itself is somewhat contrived, but that's intentional. What elevates the movie above and beyond the realm of most other Yakuza films is Miike's nutty direction, which in itself is as important to telling the story as the script or actors. Thanks to Woo, those Matrix guys, the team of Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle, and Saving Private Ryan, there are about a dozen stylistic tricks that every hack director in the world has to use now. There will be some action that suddenly snaps into the slow motion, then back into regular speed again. There will be grainy, shaky-cam shoot-out scenes. People will jump in slow motion while firing their guns. And there will probably be some "clever" colors and lighting and camera angles. Most directors ape these innovations with no real clue how to use them, or that they aren't fresh once you rip them off. There is no sense of purpose, no meaning to their direction. You can tell they're hacks whoa re just stealing style without the ideas behind them that actually made them interesting the first time around. The first time you see someone jump up in the air only to freeze there while the camera pans around, it's sort of novel. The fiftieth time it happens, you want to kill.

Miike has a lot of tricks and wild flare to his direction, but it's never derivative, and it always seems to have a point. Well, most of the time, anyway. The wildly successful opening sequence is a prime example. The pounding music, fast cuts, and hyperactive pacing are wonderful at communicating the feeling of being smack dab in the middle of the seedy, violent criminal nightlife of a wild part of town like Shibuya, though when we were there we saw only a few strippers and not a single fat guy with ramen noodles exploding out of his belly. I guess we should have spent less time in record and toy stores and more time in sleazy strip clubs, but then, that's true no matter what part of the country I'm in.

Crime films love to OD on style, and in doing so, they make the crime seem cool, or at least cool looking. What's more poetic than Chow Yun-fat in his white suit jumping in slow motion through a church with both guns a-blazing? Or Leon Lai picking his way through neon-lit back alleys as hip music drowns out all other sound? Dead OR Alive is so wonderful at bringing the real-life sleaze and dirt to the forefront, however, that there remains no vestige of coolness in the crime. Riki is cool looking, but he's also an asshole. When people die, they die suddenly and violently, not in slow motion with opera music playing. While I'd stop way short of calling the film "realistic," there is a definite grimy realism in its depiction of the underworld, which is called "the underworld" for a reason. Miike is refreshing because, unlike most directors with a highly developed sense of style, he actually has a reason. He has something to say, even if it's wrapped up in the most audacious package one can imagine.

After grabbing your attention and setting the mood, he allows the film to coast on the adrenaline of that first segment, slowing things down to near Takeshi Kitano-like speeds but keeping enough weirdness around to prevent you from losing interest. After all, with an opening like that, you know something crazy is going happen eventually. Miike uses the relatively leisurely pace of the middle of the film to build the tension and anticipation to the final pay-off, which is the sort of pay-off no one could have seen coming. Miike knows exactly when to pull back so that he doesn't desensitize people the way a lot of MTV-edited overly loud blockbusters tend to do. Non-stop 100% action from end to end is actually a lot less interesting and exciting than it might sound at first, and Miike understands this.

On the acting front, the weakest actors here could be called "very good," or alternately, "damn good" if you are George Patton or Special Agent Cooper. Most of the time, it's downright superb. Riki Takeuchi is fast digging a hole for himself, typecast as the quintessential cool, ruthless young gangster with good hair. Frankly, that's not a bad gig. I've never been one to sympathize with those actors who bemoan the fact that they are typecast and never allowed to spread their artistic wings and prove themselves to the world. I know, it can spiritually fulfilling and all, but still, give me a break. I didn't learnt he craft of building webpages then sit around and complain about how no one will let me paint their portrait. Heart surgeons don't sit around complaining about how no one will ever let them prove themselves at brain surgery. If you have a talent, use it, and don't worry about being typecast. If you're typecast, it's because you're good at what you do.

Takeuchi kicks major ass as Ryu, managing to keep the character subtle even while engaging in the most outrageous antics imaginable (or unimaginable). Having worked in a slew of yakuza pics in recent years, the guy has the part down almost as well as Takakura Ken had it back in the day. He's cool, and he's got the snarl down like Elvis.

Conversely, Sho Aikawa brings his world-weary cop to life with perfection. Where Ryu's façade caps off a boiling cauldron of ambition, hatred, and anger, Jojima just seems like this tired guy who simply can't get a break to save his life. It's not an original character in either case. The ambitious young blood gangster and the world-weary cop tempted by corruption are staples of the crime genre in pretty much every country. It's left to Aikaiwa and Takeuchi (and Miike himself,t o a degree) to polish the characters, to turn them from something typical into something interesting and subversive. They perform with honors.

The supporting cast is solid as well, including as it does a bunch of thugs, criminals, doomed children, strippers, dog fuckers, and that guy with the kiddy pool. And you thought those Mos Eisley guys were wretched scum and villains. With a few exceptions, everyone here positively oozes seediness. You couldn't have gotten a better (or worse) feeling if you had just cast real killers and hustlers. In contrast to a lot of the gangster stuff that goes around, there is nothing glamorous, noble, or flashy about the underworld here. It's perverse, sweaty, confined to dark back rooms, and frequently violent. Oh sure, strippers are cool, but who can enjoy even the best stripper when the guy next to you is exploding? Hmm, something about that sentence just doesn't sound right.

Just as hollow, stylistic overkill is en vogue these days, so too is it trendy to dismiss every ragged piece of crap movie as a work of satirical genius. If you make an awful horror film and everyone pans it, just turn it around and go, "No, don't you see? It's supposed to be bad! It's a parody!" This annoys the unholy hell out of me, and it seems any old hunk of junk can protect itself by pretending to be a clever parody rather than an idiotic straight film. Takashi Miike uses Dead or Alive to remind us that true parody, true satire, is best accomplished when the lampooning is subtle (not that subtle is an adjective most people would apply to Miike) and the movie is actually, you know, good. He's not unlike Seijun Suzuki, who in the 1960s walked a very similar path in turning the yakuza film inside out by applying wild style and a cast of truly twisted characters in brilliant landmark films like Branded to Kill and Youth of the Beast.

Dead or Alive is equal parts Suzuki and Beat Takeshi taken to their most illogical extremes. Jojima looks more than a little like Takeshi Kitano looks in his various crime films, and the pacing in the middle of the film definitely tips you off to the fact that Miike is playing around with Beat's style, though he stops short of lengthy static shots of some guy looking at the camera. As I said earlier, where Takeshi Kitano would puncutate his pondering philosophical stretches with scenes of bleak and surprising violence, Takashi Miike opts instead for straight-up gross-out scenes, most of them involving bodily by-products and assorted fluids one doesn't want flung at oneself, not that you really want any sort of fluid, even clean water, being flung at you without your consent. The nihilistic tone definitely matches pace with Beat as well. Hell, he even used Hideo Yamamoto, the cinematographer on Takeshi Kitano's Hana-Bi! But then, of course, it all veers wildly into left field, taking nihilism itself to its most outrageous extreme in the finale, in which Ryu announces to all parties, "This is the final scene." Dead or Alive is a shining example of just how good satire can be when it's done by someone who actually knows what they're doing.

Although the gross-out factor will scare a lot of people away, let's face it: who really wanted those people around anyway? They can go watch the latest effort involving a pixie-like outsider who teaches us all the value of love and understanding as everyone smiles through their tears. Those who can cut through the slime will find Dead or Alive to be one of the most ferocious, funny, twisted, and original gangster films in years. Takashi Miike has taken a middling, predictable script and used it to turn an entire genre inside out and upside down. Genius is often mad, and they don't come madder than the genius of Takashi Miike. Dead Or Alive knows exactly what you expect, and it does its best to confound your expectations not by disappointing you, but by topping your imagination. It's one of the only films I've seen that not only subverts a genre, but manages to subvert itself with such abrupt changes in mood and pacing and such shocking but distracting forays into human oddity and perversion.

Many will love it, many will hate it, and some will no doubt try and get the damn thing banned. But make no mistake about it, Dead or Alive is a movie that is more than worth the time, and Takashi Miike makes sure that he takes everything you've seen before and delivers it in ways you've never seen before. Me? I thought it was absolutely brilliant.

Labels: Action: Yakuza, Country: Japan, Director: Takashi Miike, Year: 1999