What Movie Should I Watch Tonight? ‘DOA: Dead or Alive,’ a Forgotten, Delightful Video Game Flop

Photo: Dimension Films

Have we entered peak videogame cinema? Financially, the answer is definitely yes; A Minecraft Movie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie are two of the biggest family-film hits in years, and the Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy has a higher average gross than the John Wick series. What’s maybe more surprising is that a lot of these movies have gotten surprisingly decent reviews. Even something relatively negligible like this weekend’s game adaptation Until Dawn is getting some better notices than many of its 2000s-era brethren. Most of these, like the 2005 movie of Doom, are genuine junk, and pretty much anyone interested in the Resident Evil series has gotten the memo that they’re secretly kinda great. So are there any other artifacts from the old, bad era of game-based movies that are better than their reputation? I’m so glad I pretended you asked! The answer is yes: D.O.A.: Dead or Alive, a fighting-game adaptation that is up there with the 1995 Mortal Kombat as one of the most blissfully silly action movies of the post-Nintendo era. Because it was a barely-released box office flop back in 2007, there’s a very good chance you haven’t seen it, and because it’s currently streaming for free (with ads) on Pluto, Fandango at Home, Prime Video, and whatever Fawesome is, there’s an even better chance that you can watch it tonight!

Why watch DOA: Dead or Alive tonight?

Photo: ©Dimension Films/Courtesy Everett Collection

It’s easy to understand why D.O.A. flopped in theaters. It promises essentially what you’d get from an issue of Maxim (it was a different time), which in most situations was cheaper than the price of a movie ticket, and you get to keep it besides. But if D.O.A.: Dead or Alive is a gaming movie with hilariously blatant male gaze – Christie (Holly Allen), one of the three lead characters, is introduced while engaging in a fight wearing a towel; Tina (Jaime Pressley) spends a lot of her screen time in a bikini; Kasumi (Devon Aoki) is a ninja princess, but she doesn’t dress much like either – it’s also, somehow, not really a sleazy one. None of the three women are meaningfully victimized, their scantily-clad presentation is ultimately less lascivious than many music videos of the era, and they all fight like hell.

That’s really the key to D.O.A. It was directed by the late, great Corey Yuen, a Hong Kong director and action choreographer who directed a bunch of early Jet Li movies in the ’90s and choreographed action for American features (some but not exclusively featuring Li) in the ’00s. He did so much action work on 2002’s The Transporter that he received a co-director credit; D.O.A. is credited to Yuen as a solo director, and his final film in that capacity. (Sadly, he died during the pandemic, though it wasn’t publicized until recently.) He went out on a weird, delightful achievement; D.O.A. is about as close as an English-language movie has gotten to Oops! All Fights! The aforementioned Christie, Tina, and Kasumi are among those summoned to an island to participate in a fighting tournament; they fight before, during, in between, and after the main event, investigating some mysterious goings-on in the process. (Eric Roberts is there; you do the math.)

These fights are not realistic. They combine traditional stunt work, wire work, and obvious computer effects. But Yuen knows how to use these tools together to fake it with style. That style is basically if the gals from McG’s Charlie’s Angels movies were somehow transported into a Zhang Yimou movie like Hero or House of Flying Daggers. Colors are bright, scarves are flowing, ninjas are plentiful, women are constantly leaping into the air and balancing themselves on swords – stuff like that. There is almost no dramatic tension, and the acting could be charitably described as charming.

Charm counts for a lot, though, and acting isn’t just the recitation of dialogue. Aoki and Pressley especially give impressive physical performances; even when their moves are impossible, they throw themselves into the illusion. As shameless as the movie can seem, there’s also a pure-cinema element to its T&A silliness. And look: How often does a video game movie actually star three women, instead of sticking one in the fifth-lead slot? I’m not saying the bikini-heavy fighting movie with a volleyball break is Doing a Feminism, but it’s nice to dig up an artifact of mid-2000s culture that’s playfully problematic, rather than sneeringly so.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.