DOA: Dead or Alive: The Movie: The Unofficial Creepy Misogynist Commentary Track

The gushing quote on my copy was “The movie Charlie’s Angels should have been!”, which cleverly doesn’t specify what, precisely, it actually was that Charlie’s Angels should have been, allowing you to fill in the blanks yourself. So if you think that Charlie’s Angels should have been…

• …straight to DVD.
• …shorter.
• …bereft of a sequel.
• …lacking a scene where John Cleese appears alongside somebody from Friends, purely for fear of the universe self-destructing out of shame and embarrassment.
• …directed by somebody other than the future producer of Search for the Next Doll.
• …made without Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu in the lead roles, thus giving them time to do something interesting instead.
• …made with a former Neighbours actor-turned-pop star with a fake British accent in the lead, if only to continue the traditions laid down by Street Fighter.

…then you are in luck, ma’am, because DOA: Dead or Alive delivers on all these counts and more. It even has Eric Roberts in it, playing a mad scientist who’s going to upload the fighting styles of the world’s greatest martial artists into a pair of hi-tech glasses. Yes, just like Joe 90. A lesser writer might have added “…but more wooden”, except he’s by far the best thing in it. Sadly, he’s isn’t on screen much, because the movie is – to quote the DVD making of – “about women kicking ass”.

Except, hang on, let’s look at this statement for a second, because it gets to the heart of the problem. To be sure, DOA: Dead or Alive has women kicking ass in it, but is that what the movie is actually about…?

The issue here is, as touched on in one of my disturbingly-frequent posts that somehow involve Dracula, that action / horror / sci-fi movies are made with a predominately-male audience in mind, and a predominately-male audience doesn’t want to identify with women. This is because movie producers live a parallel universe where Aliens and Terminator 2 were box-office failures, and Xena and Buffy was cancelled after seven episodes. Combined! Identifying with women is the surest path to catching gay, as any fule kno.

Let’s forget the boobs for a second, in spite the movie’s efforts. If there was a movie about the top three male martial artists in the world attending a tournament, what might we expect from it, if it were as generic as possible? Well, watching them training while they grunt and break bits of wood, that would probably happen. We’d expect to be taken through the tournament with them, and (ostensibly) feel elated when they win or despondent if they lose. When one of them has to prove to their father that they’ve got it in them to win, it would be portrayed as a dramatic, triumphant moment (ostensibly). When they spend time together in between fights, there’d be rivalry, probably some grudging respect, and lots of shots of them looking intense and brooding. If one was being chased by an assassin who turned out to be their half-sibling, the filmmakers would make a big deal out of the morality of the situation. When all three team up to taken down the Big Bad at the end, it would be an (ostensibly) iconic, fist-in-the-air, let’s-kick-ass moment. Something along these lines, anyway, regardless of whether it was a goofy action/comedy, a drama that happened to have fights in it, or a dialogue-lite martial arts film. Even Street Fighter tried to be rousing and inspirational, and that climaxed with Jean-Claude Van Damme fighting Gomez Adams, for fuck’s sake. We’d be expected to be involved in what the characters were going through, and to care about what they’re trying to achieve.

DOA: Dead or Alive, though? We remain disconnected from the characters at all times and find out barely anything about them, save their perfunctory background stories. Tina, for instance, is trying to prove to her father that she can handle it in the manly man’s world of manly professional wrestling, but instead of treating it like an actual conflict and asking us to identify with her struggle, we get… a comedy sequence where he falls off a raft, complete with boi-oi-oing sound effects. “Overcoming the father figure” is by far the most revered, self-consciously important theme in movies like this, because it’s (ostensibly) a universal experience blah blah Jung blah blah mythic blah blah same fucking plot as last time. But we can’t have a woman function as our avatar, oh no we can’t, so we end up with Jackie Chan as performed by the Keystone Kops instead. We don’t get a sense that the characters’ rivalry even exists, let alone matters, because instead of going into their actual motivations and feelings, it keeps pulling back and giving us extended scenes of them bathing or playing volleyball instead. We don’t follow the road they took to become martial artists or find out anything about what makes them the best in the world, we’re just told that they are. There’s no connection to the characters not because the movie is badly written and directed, but because nobody was trying to make the connection in the first place. This isn’t a movie “about women kicking ass”, it’s a movie where they’ve brought the stock personality-free T&A action girl to the fore, and in doing so has laid bare her faults in the worst possible way. You can’t do a movie “about” her, because she’s so lightweight as to be ethereal. I’d argue that classes on “Writing the Other” should be mandatory in any half-decent writing course, not for any great political reasons, but simply because it might stop bollocks like this from happening as often.

BUT THERE’S MORE!

Yes, on behalf of somebody I’m seriously reconsidering talking to again for reasons that will soon become obvious, some spontaneous observations made during DOA: Dead or Alive.

• Holly Valance – the one in the front of the picture – isn’t attractive enough. No explanation given, she just isn’t.
• Devon Aoki – the one on the right – “has a face like a marshmallow” and “they should have found a more attractive Asian”.
• But not Lucy Liu, who “isn’t hot” because “she’s a loudmouth” and “Asian chicks are hot because they’re quiet”.
• Although Holly Valance isn’t attractive, she’s at least more attractive then Kate Keltie, who played her sister on Neighbours and was “a tubby thing” that nobody would “waste their time on”.
• The appearance of Eric Roberts prompts him to mention that Julia Roberts “is a slut” because “she sleeps around”.
• It wasn’t as good as Meet the Spartans.

Yeah, I got nothing.

Disgust was registered, although it made no difference since he interpreted it as me trying to score points by making him feel stupid. Some people seem to be genetically incapable of accepting arguments as arguments rather than rhetorical pissing contests, so I honestly don’t know if there’s any point pressing the issue and I might just avoid him from now on.