Dead or Alive 2: Tôbôsha

Watched Miike’s “Dead or Alive 2” last night. It wasn’t nearly as good as the first one; it was, in fact, pretty lousy. It wasn’t quite so much the slow pace as it was the cloying sentimentality that marred the first DoA. While the line between true feeling and true goo will often be in different places for different people, suffice to say that a plot that hinges on a couple of hit men using their earnings as proceeds for vaccines in third world countries is, or certainly ought to be beyond the pale for anyone. Not so much because it presents to the viewer a moral conundrum involving the grey zone between good and evil, but because it is such an artistic conundrum that is almost nowhere good and everywhere bad. Hit men are fitted out with angels’ wings, like the old R.E.M. video, and as in DoA 1 but for different reasons, we have to laugh. In DoA 2 I’m not so sure that this is Miike’s intention, and now I’m having doubts about the earlier movie. I later read a review at the imdb site that made me wish I’d paid more attention to the scenes involving a play performed at a children’s school, but I admit that I found the movie so god-awful boring I put the disc on fast forward and watched the last half at 4x speed. On to the finale. D