*Warning: graphic violence and spoilers for Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive*

The ending of Takashi Miike’s, Dead or Alive, is perhaps one of the strangest endings to a film I’ve ever seen.  Up to the final ten minutes, the film plays out like many other gangster flicks of the genre.  A Chinese Yakuza member and his gang turn the gangster world upside down while a Japanese detective is hot on their heels.  Sounds familiar right?  I’m reminded of Infernal Affairs (2002), and the cat and mouse game the undercover detective and crooked cop play throughout the film.  Infernal Affairs would later be remade with critical acclaim as The Departed (2006) in the United States.  Michael Mann’s, Heat (1995) also comes to mind.

However, the end of Dead or Alive sets is where things get weird and pushes this traditional genre film into something different.  Jojima, the Japanese detective, seemingly pulls a bazooka out of nowhere and fires it at the Chinese Yakuza memeber, Ryuuichi.  Not to be out done, Ryuuichi, conjures a magic red orb from his chest and sends it flying at the oncoming missile.  The two weapons crash together.  Miike then cuts to a wide shot from space of planet Earth as the shock wave of the impact destroys the entire world.  Cut to credits.

Huh?

Did they literally just destroy the world?  I would say no, and not just because the film spurned a sequel with one of the same characters.  I’ve always interpreted this ending as a metaphor of sorts.  Sort of the way David Lynch (one of Miike’s favorite filmmakers) often has his films spiral into complete surrealism and you’re left to make sense of the pieces.  Takashi Miike loves an outsider.  Both the main characters in this film are out of step with the rest of society for one reason or another.  The two main characters destroy a world they never really belonged to in the first place.

I’m reminded of Chico’s lecture about finding “content in the contentless.”  Miike’s work is often criticized for being exploitative and often cheap.  I don’t agree.  It may not always be obvious, but Takashi Miike is a director with a strong point of view and a lot to say.