DOA: Dead or Alive (2006)

Corey Yuen's DOA: Dead or Alive arrived in 2006 as a German-American-British co-production of a Japanese fighting game, shot largely in China, and released in North America nearly a year late and without press screenings. The plot concerns an invitation-only martial arts tournament on an island, a sinister neural-interface project, and four women who begin as rivals and end as a team. The film grossed $7.7 million against a $30 million budget. It is, by most measures, a failure. It is also, by the narrow measures that concern us here, a remarkably clean specimen.

The ensemble is genuinely international, drawing on Devon Aoki, Kane Kosugi, Collin Chou, and Natassia Malthe, yet this reflects a video game roster and a Hong Kong co-production rather than any deliberate casting mandate. Race is never mentioned. Neither is sexuality. The film offers no climate anxiety, no critique of capital, no body-positive reassurance, and no interest in neurodivergence; the resident egghead is a stock nerd caricature played for laughs. Four women do headline the picture and do eventually join forces to defeat Eric Roberts, but the camera spends its time on bikinis, swimsuit volleyball, and leering slow motion, which makes any girl-power reading incidental at best.

And that is the point. DOA has no sermon in it. The villain wants to sell his sunglasses technology to global buyers; the thief wants a vault of cash. Greed is a plot device, not an indictment. The film is pure fantasy combat, wire work, ninjas, explosions, and it never once turns to the audience to explain what it all means. In an era when even the most disposable entertainment arrives with a moral attached, this one simply hits people and moves on. We are obliged to record it as one of the least preachy films of its decade, and also one of the worst. The two facts sit together without contradiction.