Yakuza assassinations cross-cut with world vision footage of starving children in Africa. CGI birds representing the childhood spirits of our two protagonists. Digital graphics illustrating the geometry of three bullets entering a head at 60 degree angles. A powerful comet sighted against the night sky. The title card “Where are you?” repeated, white text against black. All this and more occurs in Dead Or Alive 2: Birds (2000), the second in Japanese director Takashi Miike’s Dead Or Alive trilogy and the only one available to stream on Tubi. Each film is a stand-alone entry, the only common thread being that they all star Show Aikawa and Riki Takeuchi as co-leads. A Yakuza gangster thriller that upends expectations with a wannabe magician demonstrating gang warfare using three packets of cigarettes, we follow the peroxide blonde hitman Mizuki (Aikawa) who is tasked with rubbing out a rival gang. When he is beaten to the punch by another gangster, Shuuichi (Takeuchi), Mizuki realises its his childhood friend. Reconnecting while both on the run and holidaying on the island where they grew up in an orphanage, the two men spend time remembering themselves as boys. The film settles into a poetic reverie, reminiscent of Beat Takashi’s Sonatine, even as Miike intercuts comic-book violence and profane, sick humour (be warned) and gags that continually surround and prick at the warm sentimentality at its centre. It’s a uniquely weird, brazenly over-the-top experience. Miike is playing fast and loose, throwing in ideas and subverting cliches, all the while commenting on the Yakuza genre that he’s working in and subverting their interest in brotherhood by turning it into a wholesome tale of lost innocence. Recommended.
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