Let's be realistic.

A Disappointing Continuation

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The ace cop of a totalitarian police force and a drifting android play their parts in a post-apocalyptic society. They are destined to fight. Their encounter will change them forever.What we have here is Miike going full-on Miike, letting his absurd vision overtake any attempt at a rational film. Some may appreciate that. For me, other than that funky saxophone player, I find it to be a waste of just about everyone's time. The film is rife with references to "Blade Runner", "The Matrix", "Brave New World" and others -- sometimes not so subtle. And although this is allegedly the 2300s, no attempt is made to make it look anything different from the year 2000. Which means, watching it in 2017, it already seems silly and dated.Tom Mes sums up his thoughts on the movie by saying it is "too much of an in-joke and not enough of a fully developed film." Deferring to the master, I would have to agree. Miike pumped out many video releases over the years, and continues to do so. Because of his prolific activity, some of the movies come out half-baked. This is one of them. Really for the die-hard fan only.Although Arrow Video had Tom Mes record commentary for all three "Black Society" films and the first "Dead or Alive", he mysteriously does not provide commentary on parts two and three of "Dead or Alive". In fact, the special features seem to be primarily focused on the first film, which is a bit of a shame (even if we can all agree it is the most iconic of the series).

Two actors play rival gangsters in three films, the final of which is a sci-fi film, that nods strangely to William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, and anime all at once. The robots are actually called "replicants", a reference to Dicks Blade Runner(several visual allusions to the film can be found as well) and the bad guy is a psychotic gay mayor obsessed with limiting procreation through use of a compulsory drug for "heterosexual love is fleeting, and homosexual love is eternal"....martial arts fights ensue, a first for the dead or alive films. The hilarious climax involves the two leads morphing into a winged robot with a gigantic phallus for a head, who personifies "destruction", which has been the path of both characters thus far, their individual minds and later literal heads functioning as something like testicles. The film ends with the mayor f*&%ing his free jazz playing boy lackey as the robot apparently tears down a wall around them, the last words of the mayor "Oh f*&%", followed by a quick fade to black. Part of me felt cheated, part of me confused, but mostly I was just laughing. A lot of the film is quite boring though, the best scenes bookend the film while the rest is far too slow. Takashi Miike has always mined the sexual motifs beneath male violence in action films, and this film with the exception of "Gozu", reinforces this theme more than any other. Sex and violence are two pretty basic themes, but like Cronerberg(who the jazz interludes may be a homage to ala Naked Lunch)Miike is able to show where the two connect, to hilarious an oddly cohesive effect.

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.

This film makes several nods to various science fiction films. The prologue reminds me of the one for the original theatrical version of THX-1138 (the trailer for BUCK ROGERS, here it was clips from some early Japanese SF TV show). Then the opening shot of the city in 2345 has the dragon blip flying overhead with a billboard, reminding one immediately of BLADERUNNER. The BLADERUNNER aspect comes evenmore pronounced when we meet the hero, who is called a Replicant (He is blond haired and is called Ryo, a homage to Roy Batty, Rutger Hauer's character in BLADERUNNER?). A battle scene soon ensues which reminds one immediately of THE MATRIX. The government forcing the population to take drugs is like THX-1138 and the chief enforcer, while looks like a cross between Elvis and Dan Ackroyd, turns out to be a robot, very much like the TERMINATOR. The end battle reminds one of TERMINATOR 2 and the end result is hilarious. Probably not one of the best SF films out there, but is enjoyable, certainly a lot more enjoyable than tripe like BATTLEFIELD EARTH.