Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Married Baby Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Walter Sloane Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Graham Greene The original Dead or Alive (1999) was a straight to video police/Yakuza cross-over that opened with a rock-video style montage and climaxed with a scene of jaw-dropping implausibility. It took on the clichés and characteristics of the usual police dramas that we're familiar with, but infused them with all manner of bold and brash directorial flourishes and much in the way of attention grabbing shock sequences. This second follow up - which takes the same lead actors from the first two DOA films and drops then into a whole new setting as entirely new characters (giving us a sequel in the thematic sense alone) - tones down the excessive violence and the outré spectacle even further than the preceding Dead or Alive 2: Birds (2000) - to give us an oddly uneven film that strives to tie together the various ideas of destiny, identity, karma and reincarnation, whilst simultaneously offering us a strange combination of the worlds of Ridley Scott, Wong Kar-Wai, Shinya Tsukamoto and Takashi Kitano, respectively. What we have then is an increasingly odd construction - part action film, part cyber-punk pastiche - bringing to a close this always daring Miike Takashi-directed meta-trilogy, in a way that will please all fans... without necessarily blowing them away.With these factors in mind I would definitely agree with the general online consensus - which considers this to be a step-back from the first two films, in particular the lyrical splendour of Birds (which could easily be listed as one of the best films of Miike's career thus far) - with the film in question seriously lacking that particular work's emphasis on character, or indeed, the first film's kaleidoscopic disregard for logic and convention. What we have instead is a fun little film that meanders along from one cyber-punk cliché to the next, occasionally coasting on a wave of broad humour, or a particularly nice directorial flourish; such as the title of the film appearing in the background on a giant CGI gunship, or the shoot-out in the alleyway that is incredibly well choreographed. None of this really adds up to a satisfactory whole, however, with the film, for me, seeming to be far too disjointed and direction-less, while the pacing, on a number of occasions, can seriously drag.Unlike much of Miike's work, Dead or Alive: Final can be vaguely described as "science fiction"; taking place in a post apocalyptic Yokohama, where the population is kept under rigid control by a half-crazed homosexual general and his army of secret police. Riki Takeuchi (Fudoh: A New Generation) is the hard boiled chief of one such unit, locking horns with Sho Aikawa's (Gozu) mellowed out drifter, who has taken up with the gang of idealistic rebels that have kidnapped Takeuchi's son. However, in true DOA style, the plot of the film is mostly nonsensical; ripped off from a variety of other sources such as THX-1138, Blade Runner, Tetsuo: The Iron Man/Body Hammer, Terminator 2: Judgement Day and The Matrix; with the whole thing used as nothing more than a concept that links these two continually warring characters thematically as well as metaphorically. As a result, there's no real dramatic tension; though a brief "Terminator 2 like" relationship between Aikawa's replicant character, Ryô, the wife of the rebel-leader and a wandering young boy suggest hidden depths and sub-textual notions of family and humanity, they're soon quickly replaced by more action and sporadic attempts at humour.There are still a number of things to recommend, however; chiefly, the film's visual design, which is presented in an Edward Hopper-esquire colour scheme of autumn yellows, vivid greens and the occasional cool blue. There are also a couple of fairly impressive action sequences that draw more on physical combat as opposed to the gun play that we've come to expect from Miike's work and the DOA series as a whole; with the scene in which replicant Ryô has to escape from Officer Honda and his gang of armed mercenaries (whilst also protecting a young boy caught in up in the midst of the action) being an obvious jaw-dropping standout. Once again, there are fine performances from the two leads, with Takeuchi reprising his role as the sort of antagonist-like character to Aikawa lovable rouge, while the supporting characters, padded out by a largely Chinese cast and a few characters that actually speak in broken-English, help to lend a sense of credibility to Miike's largely 21st century depiction of the far off future (recalling Jean Luc Godard's retro-futurist classic Alphaville, as well as Michael Winterbottom's subsequent Code 46).What follows is all in good fun, moving from scenes of staggering action to more gentle moments between Ryô and his adopted family; with Miike and his scriptwriter making subtle allusions to that old sci-fi staple of the robots being more human than the humans. Sadly, none of these ideas really come to anything substantial though, with the film ultimately ending up as a visually impressive slice of sci-fi hokum with lots of Miike-like humour thrown in for good measure. Nothing here comes close to matching the level of brilliance that Miike has previously established - not only with the preceding Dead or Alive 2: Birds, but of course, with great films like Shinjuku Triad Society, Audition, Gozu, The Bird People in China and Visitor Q - but die-hard fans of the director are sure to find something to enjoy; if not the comical sparring of Takeuchi and the always enjoyable Aikawa, then certainly the rampaging sight of a gigantic Day-Glo robot with a purple penis head. Yes, you have been warned...

Joseph Sylvers 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.

MisterWhiplash 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.

paulduane This was a surprise - I was expecting something along the lines of the original DOA, not having seen any of the sequels. What you actually get is a slowish, rather beautiful, enigmatic science fiction film, rather like a Philip K Dick novel in that its central themes are love and the problem of how to be human in a mechanical world. The film borrows the notion of 'replicants' from Blade Runner (I can't remember if they were called that in PKD's source novel) but takes the idea further than that highly over-rated film, bringing us characters who don't realise that they're replicants battling replicants who are becoming human, ending with a strange metal-morphosis straight out of 'Tetsuo'. The story moves along smoothly but never really kicks into high gear. We're in 2346, in Yokohama, where the gay Mayor Wu has made the consumption of a birth control drug that destroys love a compulsory act. Babies born due to defiance of the law are destoyed, Herod-style. Riki Takeuchi (who is getting a bit porky these days!) is Wu's enforcer. Puzzlingly, he has a small son. He goes into action against some revolutionaries and has all of his most cherished illusions destroyed...Visually, the film is quite lovely, even though it seems to have been made (as per usual with Takashi) very speedily. It also seems to have been shot on some kind of video process, which doesn't hold up well on the big screen but won't bother anybody watching it at home.The ending is unfathomable even by Takashi's standards, and rather abrupt. Still, there's nobody else like him...