This weekend, we took the time to watch DOA: Dead or Alive, lovingly mailed to us by our local Netflix distribution facility.
First off, I want to refute a lot of other reviews that I’ve seen of DOA. It seems like every review I read discounts DOA as nothing but gratuitous babeage.
Yes, the main characters are hot girls. Yes, they tend to wear bikinis whenever it can be justified. And yes, they can even do complex martial arts in bikinis.
But this movie is hardly gratuitous. The bikinis are modest and the girls are portrayed as strong. This is a movie of girl power; not weak-willed sex kittens. There is nothing overly lascivious in this movie; and I even question its PG-13 rating.
With that pet peeve out of the way, let’s move on to the movie, shall we?
The problem with rating movies like this is that you can’t seriously compare them to other good movies. I can’t sit here and give this movie a B+ when I gave Juno an A-; it just wouldn’t be prudent.
Still, the movie is fun and the premise is easy to follow.
Some power-hungry dude is holding a fighting competition so he can use technology that doesn’t exist in order to steal the fighters’ powers and sell them to criminals around the world.
The fun part about this technology is that each fighter has little nano-bots inserted into their blood stream that allow the competition to be broadcast in true video game style. Our fighters have health bars and we’re treated to freeze frames with voice-overs like “Kosumi Wins!”
As the tournament progresses, of course, our lovely lasses figure out that the bad guy is up to no good and have to face off against him after he’s super-charged himself with all of their fighting prowess combined.
The characters are vibrant in this movie; which is important for a movie that has 16+ characters. The viewer is never left trying to distinguish between two fighters.
The production value of the movie is relatively high as well. Director Corey Yuen is all about the fight scenes, and some of the wire work is quite good.
Rather than choose Playboy vixens for his fighters, Yuen instead chose modestly attractive hotties who could also believably carry a fight scene; a respectable choice to be sure.
Don’t let the premise of the movie scare you away. This movie is quite a bit of fun and isn’t a horrible way to spend 2 hours of your time. It’s not an award winning film, but not every movie has to be.
Verdict: C+