Alive (2002)

Not the one with cannibalism in it -- although it wouldn't have hurt

I consider myself a fan of director Ryuhei Kitamura -- in spite of his uneven track record. Versus boasted impressive action sequences, but was a narrative mess. Aragami blessed fans with both great characters and great action. Azumi had more great action, but got bogged down with an overlong story and some groaningly inept bits of dialogue. Now he gives us Alive, a film with a compelling premise and strong leads, but a long build up to action scenes that feel fairly run-of-the-mill. Alive is one of Kitamura's most promising films -- at least until the draggy second half kicks in.

Alive begins with a condemned man named Tenshu Yashiro (Hideo Sakaki) being led to the electric chair. Sentenced to death for the murders of six men who raped and killed his girlfriend, he stoically meets his fate. When the electrocution fails to kill him, however, the warden gives him a choice - continue to live as a prisoner in a secret experiment, or stay in the chair and keep getting zapped until the job is done. Tenshu chooses the life of a lab rat, and is placed in a large room with another prisoner named Gondoh (Tetta Sugimoto), a serial rapist and murderer. They are told over an intercom that they are free to do whatever they like in the room, and that all reasonable requests for food or comfort items will be granted.

Alive has a promising setup, with overtones of Battle Royale or the German film Das Experiment, and the tension between the two characters is palpable. Tenshu is a tortured soul who mourns his lost love, while Gondoh is brash, outspoken, and easily prone to violence. He takes particular gusto from describing his horrific crimes against women, unaware of Tenshu's hatred of rapists. Confrontation between them seems inevitable, especially when the scientists conducting the experiment began to raise the room temperature or wake the prisoners up with loud alarms every half hour. But when that fails to have the two subjects at each other's throats, they introduce a new element into the mix - a partition slides up to reveal a beautiful woman named Yurika (Ryo) in the adjoining room, who tells them "Whichever one of you kills the other can come in here afterward".

But Yurika is more than just a sexual enticement to make the two men fight, and there's more to this experiment than a simple study of male aggression. Alive takes an interesting sci-fi twist in the second half, but this is also where the film begins to drag due to Kitamura's penchant for over-explaining things. The sci-fi subplot is not as clever as Kitamura seems to think it is, yet the director spends far too much time explaining it with long bouts of expository dialogue. There's simply too much talking in the second half, when the film should be ramping up the action in preparation for the climax.

Unfortunately (and I never though I'd say this about a Kitamura film) when the big action scenes finally do occur, they are deflated by too much build-up and an overbearing sense of the familiar. It's not that the fight scenes are poorly done, but that Kitamura has already raised the bar in each of his previous films -- and Alive seems content to simply limbo under it rather than raise it again. Sure it's kind of fun to see our protagonist and an albino Tak Sakaguchi (Versus, Battlefield Baseball) square off and knock each other around the room, but the showdown feels like too little, too late, and too similar to stuff we've already seen in the Matrix trilogy. That overbearing sense of familiarity, along with the fact that Sakaguchi's character simply shows up out of left field for the final fight, robs the confrontation of any emotional impetus.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about this film is that Kitamura has already done the "Two men in a room" thing much better in Aragami, only in that film he gave us two men who had to fight each other to the death, despite sharing a mutual friendship and respect. The dynamic of two men who hate each other but must avoid killing each other to survive could have worked equally well in Alive, but the story seems to abandon that more promising premise in order to pursue its later sci-fi trappings.

Alive isn't a bad film, just a somewhat disappointing one -- especially to fans familiar with the director's other work. But despite its flaws, it has a fantastic first half and a pair of very strong leads in Sakaki and Sugimoto, and although it has only a few action scenes that fail to break any new ground, Kitamura's visual style manages to make them fairly enjoyable. It's just a shame that such a promising film with such a talented cast ends up being dragged down by excessive exposition and languid pacing in the final act. This seems to be a recurring weakness of Kitamura's - taking a premise for a good 80 or 90-minute action film, and stretching it out to over two hours. Kitamura has proven that he knows how to direct . . . now he just needs to learn to be a bit more selective in the editing room.