In the second installment of the DEAD OR ALIVE trilogy, Takashi Miike references the namesake film, but presents a very different film. While still loaded with indiscriminate violence and black comedy, DEAD OR ALIVE 2 becomes a bit more sentimental. Sho Aikawa and Riki Takeuchi return to play the main characters, but this time with a moral purpose. When Mizuki (Sho Aikawa), a Yakuza gangster, witnesses a target shot by a rival assassin, he tracks down the killer to check out the competition. What he finds, however, is that his rival, Shuichi (Riki Takeuchi), is also a long-lost childhood friend. They escape from the rival gangsters who want to kill them by returning to their childhood home, where they visit the orphanage where they lived, and find a renewed sense of what is right and wrong in their lives.