Dead or Alive: Final (2002)

 

Director: Takashi Miike

Screenplay: Hitoshi Ishikawa, Yoshinobu Kamo and Toshiki Kimura

Cast: Riki Takeuchi as Officer Takeshi Honda; Show Aikawa as Ryō; Maria Chen as Michelle; Richard Chen as Dictator Woo; Jason Chu as Prisoner; Josie Ho as Jun; Tony Ho as Ping

Canon Fodder

 

Among the three Dead or Alive films by Takashi Miike – three films only connected by V-Cinema megastars Riki Takeuchi and Show Aikawa - they all deserve their own coverage, but among them the third and final one always came off as maligned. The first was a film which helped Miike’s reputation, as much due to its out-of-nowhere ending, the second film is one of his best and a reminder of his emotional and dramatic side, and Final came to the United Kingdom in the wave of Tartan Video DVDs with a dull thud. It was neither helped that at this point, when Arrow Video decided to preserve the entire trilogy for a Blu Ray release, Final was shot on standard digital with burnt in Japanese subtitles, even having included a warning the preserved copy is less than perfect due to one of this film’s many quirks.

Old films onscreen, all fantasy wuxia with homemade monster costumes, open up the film with a melancholic air before we are sent to A.D. 2346 Yokohama, in a post apocalypse when the new major, Major Wu, has enforced the strictest of population and birth control rules. Pregnant women are incarcerated and it is implied they will outright shot children to keep the population down, with Wu’s own birth control pill is mandatory for all couples to take, with an enforcer called Officer Honda (Riki Takeuchi) as his right hand. Obviously there is a rebel group, refusing to take the pill and this introduces Ryo (Show Aikawa), who wanders in abruptly in this, preventing Honda’s men gunning down a young boy, and being introduced to the rebel group, mostly two figures that have made the ill advised decision to hire gangsters to help them stop Wu. Ryo thankfully is a replicant even able to stop bullets with his hands.

Whilst the premise sounds like horrible homophobic propaganda – when Major Wu is introduced having a shirtless sexy sax man, who preaches eternal love being only possible in homosexuality – Miike films, as usual, are more complicated, especially as whilst this is set in Yokohama, most of the cast are speaking in Cantonese, and the film was shot in Hong Kong, which evokes mainland China’s controversial one child policy than anything else. Implemented between 1980 and 2015, and thus still enforced when the film was released, it was a real life attempt at reducing population rates with strict laws, and I would not be surprised this came to mind for the production alongside the idea, set in a post-apocalypse, of imagining population issues being a subject the creators wanted to explore. Wu, played by Richard Chen, is less evil due to being gay but being a bastard, but one who feels the old world, of environmental disaster and chaos, can only be prevented from appearing in these extremes, Honda enforcing this law by the book of logic. The film, is there are any issues, plays its premise as a merely a context, not as fully fleshed out as it could be, but it feels less problematic than it suggests initially.

Contextually the origin in V-Cinema adds a lot to Final as a film, as with the whole trilogy. In lieu to cinema’s constant challenges such as television, Japanese cinema in the eighties gained a new format with videotape, which led to the likes of straight-to-video anime and the cinema Takeuchi and Aikawa made their names in, let alone this being where Miike started as a director originally. Dead or Alive as a trilogy, in hindsight to Miike’s earliest films before the 2000s, with some going to cinemas but others not, feels like a capstone to this period. The sense of its repetition of the two leads, always to cross paths, feels apt for the careers of the two too, as much as the lurid and strange moments in the trilogy coming from the unpredictability of Miike’s earlier films. Here for the last time Riki Takeuchi, Elvis pompadour and cool, and Show Aikawa, eccentric with his own idiosyncratic croaky voice and dyed blonde hair, got to revisit this world one last time. The first Dead or Alice is underappreciated, as it is known for its opening and ending, but with the central crime story being just as interest as a sad, melancholic tale where even the absurdity of the ending befits two men on opposite sides of the law literally destroying the world in their hatred. Dead or Alive 2: Birds (2000) was even more idiosyncratic and bittersweet, with the leads friends and hit men who knew each other from childhood, a drama in crime genre clothing of memory, nostalgia and purpose. In comparison to Birds especially, Final does feel a curious turn, a piece which connects to earlier films, specifically one of Miike’s best Rainy Dog (1997), as passages become Ryo bonding with a woman and the child he rescued in his introduction, but is also an imperfect production next to the other two just for the sense that this could have done with a few more minutes and grown from its virtues.

Shooting in Hong Kong adds something at least for starters, never trying to be futuristic baring some aesthetic details, like CGi giant dragon ships over tower blocks, and the replicant subplot, involving robots from a war far in the past able to eat and be empathetic as much as being dangerous to normal humans. Clearly the film had interest in the country’s history of martial arts cinema, even if it would be fed through CGI, with Show Aikawa trying his own stunts. Here I have to get to its standard digital shooting style too. This is thankfully something changing over the decades, especially with the work of the likes of American Genre Film Archive in preserving shot on video films has caused titles with imperfect technological appearances to be more readily available, but I did have a legitimate concern that an era of early 2000s digitally shot films would be lost. There was some sense of the issue being how something like this, shot likely for practicality, shows the technology in its softness and being out-of-place in a world of 4K and High Definition technology especially when it came to televisions. A production like MPD Psycho (2000), his great mini-series adaptation of the Eiji Ōtsuka and Shou Tajima manga, is something left obscure and with this concern, and here you can see, with its interlacing, Final has a fuzziness to it that will put some off immediately. Considering however though, with MPD Psycho still having huge censorship bars over gore, not for censorship but on purpose, Miike does feel like someone who has toyed with the style of his films deliberately. He is one of the few able to make very obvious CGI work, as here, and the green hue to this world is a slight emphasis on this being a dystopia without overdoing it, all felt with the sense of his usual trademarks of being one of the few directors to go out of the box fully.

This does jar with the beauty of the previous films in this series, but considering the crammed, waste and water logged world of futuristic Yokohama here, it also makes sense to have this style. The film’s hardcoded Japanese subtitles also come with the fact that, continuing his interest in multiculturalism, Miike has a mostly Cantonese speaking cast, with the leader of the resistance also fluent in English. It does not hide its Japanese setting clearly being Hong Kong, and it never feels out-of-place. The golden virtue of Takashi Miike – whilst even Sion Sono could spin his wheels in repetitious content – is that Miike unless you got him on a really bad day is a chameleon, always interesting, and here too, Final becomes more of a drama as Honda’s reality is shown to him and Ryo bonds with the survivors from when the rebels are caught off guard. Here is another film where, even with its absurd moments, it still however has emotional resonance regardless of how bizarre he can get, where even a botched rescue becoming an accidental kidnapping of a child leads to a friendship between two instead.

The film eventually refers back to the two films before by the ending, openly embracing the sense of these films existing within themselves whilst still being serious. Note that, yes, the ending of Final is bizarre, with a penis robot at the end as unexpected as you would presume, alongside the end credits just recording an older man on the street singing a song. This comes with him as a filmmaker - the profound and emotional against this openly silly and juvenile content - and it does not jar from the content from the previous two Dead or Alive films either. The film's true flaw, in truth, is that I have already mentioned, that this does fell slightly undercooked, not fully fleshed out as it could be with the importance of the film, the end of this trilogy, and the virtues already here when it is both serious and it is silly.