I present to you a new segment on our blog, You Have Been Warned! Its purpose is basically to showcase and to warn our readers of movies that are bad beyond belief. I know that my first segment, Double K.O., didn't really take off. But, I do have a couple of movies in mind to restart that segment. But for now, I am here to review the movie that inspired this in the first place, DoA: Dead or Alive.
For those who do not know, DoA is based off of the video game franchise of the same name. It is a fighting game in the same vein as Virtua Fighter and Tekken, one of the flagship 3D fighters of its time. Personally, I was never a fan of the franchise and out of the main 3D fighting games, I was more of a Tekken fan. But, from what I hear, it had a very technical type of gameplay that took a while to get into but once you mastered it, DoA became a pretty deep game, or so I've heard.
Let's go over the story first before getting down to the good stuff. The story revolves around Princess Kasumi, played by Devon Aoki, who is informed of the death of her brother by his best friend Ryu Hayabusa, played by Kane Kosugi. Believing that her brother is still alive, she leaves the temple, casting herself as a shinobi, in order to find her brother. While she escapes on a handglider (from where she got this from, I have no clue), she catches a high-tech shuriken that is an invitation to the DoA tournament.
The tournament is being held by Dr. Victor Donovan, played by the forever-evil Eric Roberts, in order to find the best fighter in the world. Among the other fighters are Christie (played by Holly Valance), a thief out for the big prize, Tina (played by Jaime Pressly), a pro-wrestler out to prove that she is the real deal, and other fighters like Gen Fu, Helena, and Zack.
Not sure how much of a spoiler this is, taking into account that this is a very predictable action movie, but the big twist is that the tournament is just a front. I'll wait while you readers gather your composure. Okay, so the reason why Dr. Donovan is holding this event is so that he can gather the data from the best fighters using nano-machines he planted in each of them. He will use this data to create special glasses that will help him to predict his opponent's moves, hence making him the baddest mo-fo out there. Oh, and Kasumi's brother is not actually dead, since he was the first subject for this project. If this plot sounds familiar to any of you Tokusatsu fans, it is because this plot premise was adapted for the Jyuken Sentai Gekiranger movie back in 2007. And personally, I think the Gekiranger movie pulled it off better.
Now, for why this movie should be avoided like any Jennifer Aniston movie. In my opinion, this is exactly wrong direction that action/martial arts movies in the US should be taken. Everything about this movie seems half-hearted and consists all of the wrong elements. The tournament concept has been done to death. And even though it is based off of a fighting game and all fighting games are basically tournaments, it still could have been dealt with in a way that it would not have turned into complete trash.
If we look at this from strictly a martial arts point of view, you can immediately see the problem. The main actresses have no experience in martial arts whatsoever. Well, you may be thinking that the Matrix movies had the same issue. But, for one thing, they had the legendary Hong Kong director Yuen Wu Ping doing the choreography. The actors also trained for many months to get their bodies to the point where they could pull of the moves in a way that would look halfway believable. The choreography and skill of the majority of the actors in this movie seem to have been done on the spot. A load of wire work is used to enhance flips, kicks, and hits, but it is done in a way that it looks tacky and cheesy. I don't think even non-martial arts movie buffs thought any of the fight scenes in this movie looked good.
Which brings me to the main issue I have with this movie. I can understand why the main actresses are not martial artists. The DoA franchise has thrived on its beautiful women in the game. So of course, they had to cast attractive women to play the part. But, the fact that they wasted the talents of 3 good martial artists in this movie enrages me to no end. The main one being Kane Kosugi. Many of us Toku fans know him as Jiraiya/Ninja Black from Ninja Sentai Kakuranger. He has been a few movies since, but his career never took off. And this movie definitely didn't help him. He has one solid fight scene against a bunch of guards and one fight scene at the end of the movie with a couple of other fighters against Dr. Donovan and that is it. For the rest of the movie, he just follows Kasumi, basically moping around. It's sad that he was not given more to do. Another upset is Collin Chou, most known for playing Seraph in Matrix: Reloaded and Matrix: Revolutions, along with being in the movie Flash Point where he has the big fight with Donnie Yen at the very end. He plays Kasumi's not-so-lost brother, Hayate. But, you do not really see him until the end of the movie where he has one fight and loses to, you guessed it, Dr. Mofo Donovan. And, if you think that is bad, I was looking forward to seeing Robin Shou in the movie, because prior to watching the movie, I heard that he was in it. And you do see him, but at the very beginning and the very end of the movie. He plays an islander pirate who tries to steal Tina's boat twice and gets his butt handed to him twice. I usually try not to get emotional about stuff but, THAT'S LUI FREAKING KANG! He can't get beat 6 ways from Sunday by an 110lbs Southern bell. He can't.....
And now that I got that out of my system, let's continue shall we? So we have already established that the action is severely lacking. I mean, if they can't even showcase the wrestler using wrestling moves in her fights, we have a serious issue. The acting in this movie is also pretty bad. They try to infuse humor and shades of character throughout but they all seem to fall flat. I am still trying to figure out if it is because of the script or the actors. Maybe it is a bit of both. I would say that the only person that I enjoyed seeing in the movie was Kevin Nash, who played Tina's father. He had some of the funnier lines and actually did some legit wrestling moves in his fight with his daughter. Everything else seemed phoned in.
There is a certain stigma attached to movie adaptations of video game franchise. Most of them turn out nothing like the video games and the ones that do resemble their source material, fail in every other aspect. This movie further helped to bring down the genre of video game movies. You could put it in the same calibur of work as Uwe Boll and his endless amounts of garbage that he likes to pass as movies. Which is a shame, because it was actually directed by Corey Yuen who directed such good and entertaining films as The Transporter series, The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk with Jet Li, and one of my favorite movies, Dragons Forever starring the amazing trio of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao. So, we know that he is capable of making great Martial Arts movies. I'm just not sure what happened here. Maybe he was trying a new brand of coffee or tea at the time and that through him off a bit. Either way, this is definitely a movie that should not be seen unless you enjoy watching crap movies once in a while like myself. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
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