Dead or Alive

This is an abnormal cops versus criminals Japanese action film. There is plenty of killing and a rather confusing story about a cop with a sick daughter. It is fun to watch. It is not as good as Ichi the Killer (2001) by the same director as it is less sadistically violent. The violence in this is less extreme but still effective and bloody. This was good for me as there was plenty of bloody violence although I would have liked it to be more insane. It was a little confusing so more action would have made up for that. Random ending. It can be enjoyed for those with the stomach. There are better films though. Killers abound!

Dead or Alive" has the wild, nasty sweep of an adult-theme anime. It's so determined to ignore the taboos diligently observed in mainstream Japanese entertainment that it includes a prostitute splattered with feces as well as bestiality and a party at a grave site. By the time the insane dénouement leaves a bilious mushroom cloud over the proceedings, I was bored. The director, Takashi Miike, wants to freak out his audiences, but his ideas are third-generation copies from masters with a real taste for perversity. The film's heat comes from a microwave, not from the honest danger of an open flame. The first five minutes - jacked up with a grinding electric guitar that sounds like something you'd get if you hit the rock setting on an electronic keyboard - feature a woman's body plunging off a roof onto the street; cocaine being snorted down the length of a bar; a stripper grinding through her gyrations; two men having sex in a restroom soon covered with blood; and gunmen pulling machine guns out of a supermarket's vegetable crisper before a slaughter. After the stripper's act, a clown hits the stage and flings knives at an almost naked man strapped to a revolving table. When the table comes to a stop, a different and fully clothed man has replaced the first. As the convict exclaims to Pee-wee in "Pee-wee's Big Adventure": "Action-packed!" But "Dead or Alive" is a soulless compilation of thrills. It may raise the temperature of cynical teenage boys, for whom it seems to have been made. (They may not get in: the film is unrated, but press materials say no one under 17 will be admitted.) Unlike last year's "Nowhere to Hide," a Korean police thriller with energetic filmmaking techniques, "Dead or Alive" is interested only in keeping itself awake - something it will be unable to do for audiences. To make up for the spiritual vacancy, the film has enough plot to derail concentration. Fortunately, the movie is so shallow that you don't need to follow the narrative. If you wait long enough - say, 30 seconds or so - you're guaranteed clarifying gunfire. The protagonist, Jojima (Show Aikawa), is a taciturn detective investigating a case that involves Japanese and Chinese drug dealers. His persona is lifted from the actor and director Takeshi Kitano's castoffs: dark suits, sunglasses worn indoors, an aerodynamic, ready- for-anything brush cut. But his home life is a wreck: his daughter needs an operation he can't afford, and his suffering wife gets late-night phone calls that require whispered responses. "Evil, in itself, is not bad, as long as we keep the balance," Jojima says, and he ends up corrupted, playing with the thugs and taking their money. His nemesis, Ryuichi (Riki Takeuchi), laboring under Wayne Newton's hair style and another of Mr. Kitano's black outfits, has to deal with his treacherous Chinese partners and guilt for financing his younger brother's American education with blood money. "Dead or Alive," which opens today at Cinema Village, is a sensation-seeking soap opera. Its sentimentality is crossbred with gritty drama out of "Miami Vice" and "N.Y.P.D. Blue," a show mentioned by Jojima's boss during one of the quiet moments that alternate with the picture's compulsion to crank up its Celsius. The moments of sobriety were probably intended to amplify the tableau of outrageousness as well as to refer to the bruising somberness of Mr. Kitano's filmography. But Mr. Kitano's perspective is soul-deep, about the costs of loyalty and the price of adhering to a code of violence; here all the complexity is on the surface. "Dead or Alive" is about bombast and firepower. It's so simple- minded that the actors wear the same clothes all the time, as in a cartoon, so you can easily remember who's who. You wouldn't know it from this film, but Mr. Miike is a skillful director who can rouse an audience: his earlier film "Audition" is harrowing and unforgettable. It incorporated his compulsion for shock effects into a piece of storytelling about a corrosive relationship that shakes its characters to the core. It sticks with you in a way the hurt-me juvenilia of "Dead or Alive" can't. In this case, the director is happy to banish all thoughts from his head and instead dazzle with his quick reflexes.