DOA: FINAL (2002, 88 mins)

 Miike’s DOA trilogy is a hard thing to evaluate critically.  The three films bear almost no relation to one another beyond the presence of lead actors (and kings of V Cinema) Riki Takeuchi and Sho Aikawa.  The first film was responsible, along with the same year’s AUDITION (1999), for catapulting Miike to international superstardom (well, of a sort anyway) and remains, in my opinion at least, Miike’s best film to date.  The second film (DOA II: BIRDS (2000)) was in every way an anti-sequel – this time Riki and Sho team up, and the mood of the film as a whole is much lighter, though there are a few typically unpleasant scenes. For the third film, Miike sets the action in the future and once more has Riki fighting Sho, though this time out Riki rather than Sho plays the cop. DOA: FINAL was filmed in Hong Kong in mid 2001 but not released until January 2002.

The film takes place in 2346 AD (why 2346? I don’t know. Miike does explain in the supplementary material on the DVD, but I don’t speak Japanese so I’m none the wiser!), and is set in Yokohama.  For some (unexplained) reason, most of the inhabitants speak Cantonese rather than Japanese. Honda (Takeuchi) is head of police, and is married to Cindy .  The couple have a young child, Takeshi. The city is run by  camp, gay Mayor Woo (Richard Chen), who states that “true love only exists as homosexual love”. He has a young saxophonist companion, who is always half naked. The police mainly exist to enforce Woo’s policy of complete birth control – everyone must take a birth control drug, and no children are allowed to be born. Ryo (Aikawa) is a replicant – a super-fast android built to fight. He falls in with a gang who refuse to take the drug and are victimised by Honda and the police. The gang plan to kidnap Woo in order to get some of their gang who have bee taken prisoner back. However, the plan goes wrong and the gang end up with Takeshi, Honda’s son, instead. They arrange to exchange Takeshi for their gang members, but things are not quite so simple…

The above summary pretty much covers the plot of DOA: FINAL.  Yokohama 2346 doesn’t look especially futuristic – the only real differences are large airships that pass overhead occasionally and cool cigarettes that burn down in one drag. We’re told that beyond the city there is only “sand and wind”, which leads one to assume that nuclear war (or the end of the first DOA film!) has destroyed much of the world. There’s a vague explanation for the birth control policy (too many people = war = pollution) and also for the creation of the replicants, but Miike never was too interested in spelling out all the details in his films.

The film sits uncomfortably between three genres – SF, HK-style fights and melodrama. The SF aspect is very Philip K Dick influenced (‘is a robot capable of love?’ is one of Dick’s central themes, as is ‘what does it mean to be human’?), right down to the use of the term ‘replicants’, but the film also references the TERMINATOR films, ROBOCOP and Miike’s own FULL METAL GOKUDO (1997). The fight sequences are done in a very HK fashion, with lots of wire work and impossible jumps, etc, whilst the melodramatic parts of the film really feel too heavy handed and are not handled very well. Like the two preceding films in the trilogy, the middle part of the film is unevenly paced, whilst the beginning and end are the most memorable parts.

A major problem with the film is the bizarre variety of languages spoken. Only Riki and Sho speak Japanese. The rest of the cast mainly speak Cantonese, though the gang leader (Terence Jin) speaks English and some other characters speak a fourth language, which isn’t translated. Effectively, this means that almost every scene in the film is subtitled in Japanese, making it almost count as a ‘foreign language’ film domestically. This can’t have been too wise commercially, but obviously doesn’t matter too much when watching the entire film subtitled, as Western viewers will be. An additional problem concerns the way in which the movie has been transferred to film – Miike shot using digital video and apparently the final product looks pretty bad on a large screen. Watching on a standard (28”) widescreen TV, this isn’t at all obvious, but it’s a shame that Miike couldn’t have just used film to begin with. Miike also employs varying film speeds at certain points throughout the film for no discernible reason – the film does contain some CINEMA PARADISO-style iconification of the cinema projector, and perhaps the different speeds are supposed to be a reference to old fashioned film (the movie opens with scenes from crummy old Japanese films played through a projector).

If all this sounds very negative then I should make one thing clear: this isn’t a bad film. The opening ten minutes are fantastic and the ending is in true Miike style – completely bizarre and unexpected, but it still feels as though Miike didn’t really know where he was going with it, or how to end it (exactly why do Sho and Riki have this last climactic fight? Simply because the rules say they have to? It’s not clear, and the use of scenes from the earlier films doesn’t help clarify matters). There’s an interesting jazz score (by Miike regular Koji Endo), and a very un-PC take on the evil gay bad guy, but as a whole the film doesn’t quite work and is certainly the least of the trilogy.

Cast
Sho Aikawa – Ryo
Riki Takeuchi – Honda
Josie Ho – Jun
Maria Chen – Michelle
Terence Yin – Fong
Richard Chen – Mayor Woo
Hiroyoshi Komuro

Crew
Director – Takashi Miike
Producers – Toshiki Kimura, Mitsuru Kurosawa, Yoshihiro Masuda, Makoto Okada, Tsutomu Tsuchikawa & Ken Takeuchi (planner)
Screenplay – Hitoshi Ishikawa, Yoshinobu Kamo & Ichiro Ryu
Music – Koji Endo
DP – Kazunari Tanaka
Editing – Shuuwa Kogen