"Dead Or Alive" (1999)

(Originally released as Dead Or Alive: Hanzaisha)

Starring: Riki Takeuchi, Sho Aikawa, Renji Ishibashi, Hitoshi Ozawa, Shingo Tsurumi, Kaoru Sugita

First, the lowdown: Yet another John Woo-inspired gangster drama. Except Japanese.

For those who aren’t fluent in Japanese culture, here’s a little bit of something you should know before watching this film: Chinese-born Japanese citizens aren’t terribly well-treated in the land of the Rising Sun. In fact one person I talked to likened the Japanese attitude toward Chinese immigrants to the American attitude toward Mexicans. (Of course much of it can also be attributed to the fact that China and Japan have been enemies for centuries as well as Japan’s xenophobic history.)

The Shinjuku underworld: a wretched hive of scum and villainy in the heart of downtown Tokyo. While repetitive industrial music plays, strippers and escorts go about their business, and three Chinese-connected gangsters are executed (one of them while he’s sodomizing a street hustler in the john). The police are obviously concerned, the men were all Chinese-born and catered to the immigrant population. The Yakuza are concerned as well because A: they didn’t do it, B: they’re trying to make negotiations of their own with a Taiwanese drug lord, and C: whoever executed the Chinese bosses probably has the resources to go after THEM.

The police assign Detective Jojima, who has enough of his own problems. Things are tense in his marriage (so much so that his wife has started cheating on him) AND his daughter needs surgery because of a life threatening heart condition, but cannot afford the expenses (20 million yen, or about $170,000). After finding out that the Yakuza are equally confused about the murders, Jojima starts digging until he finally finds the culprits.

It’s a group of Chinese war orphans, ostracized by both the Triads and Yakuza, that have decided to band together and go into business for themselves. The first order of business is the elimination of their competition, which is done with brutal precision. However, taking down the Yakuza is a different matter, the Oyabun (the Yakuza equivalent of a Mafia “Don”) isn’t stupid, and has enough people and connections to make any assassination attempt difficult.

And it’s this point where things started looking rather familiar to me. Lessee, we got an upstart group of unknowns bent on taking out the “big guys”, a tormented police officer who loses himself in his job to escape his dismal home life; and an ultra-cool hitman with a stone-cold expression, trenchcoat, and wrap-around shades. Holy shit! It’s John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, only with more gore. (And a LOT of sex acts that one usually only finds on the internet.)

This is my second movie by Takashi Miike and I’ve noticed that he has a Zucker/Abrahams kind of philosophy to filmmaking: If the last bit didn’t squick you, just wait a minute and the next one might. Which becomes very jarring when the movie shifts down a gear from it’s bombastic opening to a gritty detective drama, and then back up again. Unfortunately the last 30 seconds of the movie ended up completely invalidating it for me, but not so much that I’m going to tell you what happens.

Line of the movie: “But like they say – even a scarecrow keeps away the sparrows.”

Three and a half stars. I’ve got new socks on.