Takashi Miike Capsule Reviews
Dead or Alive — November 1, 2017
No filmmaker in the world has more fun that Takashi Miike. That’s evident from a late career masterpiece like 2012’s Ace Attorney, or from the last of the prolific director’s films to play here in Seattle, Yakuza Apocalypse. But even going back to 1999’s Dead or Alive, playing one night only today at the Grand Illusion, you find that streak of absurd humor and perversity electrifying even the grimmest of bloody gangster sagas. The movie opens with a music video of destruction, rapidly cutting between locations as nameless gangsters live their good lives (prostitutes and strippers, cocaine and ramen) only to be cut down by a coordinated assault by ruthless assassins. The killers turn out to be a gang of immigrants from Taiwan led by Ryūichi, a pompadoured man in black, who are trying to instigate a gang fight between the local yakuza and Japanese Triads and take control of the heroin importation racket. On their trail is a reasonably honest cop named Jojima, who comes complete with a wife who’s endlessly worried about their ability to pay for a life-saving operation for their sullen teenage daughter. The plot careens wildly from one generic scene to another, enlivened at every turn by Miike’s eye for over-the-top grotesquerie, manic framing, and apocalyptic greens and yellows. Sidelong glances at political relevance (a barely attended lecture on the future of communism in the post-Soviet era, the social pressures that allow an underground economy (and thus the gang warfare that goes with it) to flourish) are smash cut with the most appalling violence and cruelty, daring theory to account for our demented world. In the end, even genre itself cannot contain the depravity and contradictions at the heart of the cop/gangster drama, from The Big Heat to Battles without Honor and Humanity, the lunatic cycles of violence escalate beyond all reason, cop and gangster burning the world and all to red dust.
Ace Attorney — March 16, 2017
The Speed Racer of courtroom dramas.
