Battle Royale II – ugh!
Posted on | February 8, 2004 at 5:29 pm | Comments Off
Yesterday, I received my region-3 copy of Battle Royale II and watched it on my all-region Malata DVD player. As any of you whom I made sit through the first movie can attest, it’s one of my all-time favorite guilty pleasures, so I was looking forward to the sequel. You know how some sequels are better than the originals? Well this isn’t one of them. Not even close. Spoiler warning…
The original movie, Battle Royale, was an exploitive Japanese B-movie about a class of junior high school kids who are plopped down on an island and forced to kill each other off. Especially in the post-Columbine world, it was a sick, disgusting perversion of a movie that was one of the most disturbing things I’d ever seen. Yet it kept me on the edge of my seat, hoping that the hero and heroine Nanahara and Noriko, would find some way out of this impossible situation. There was some inventiveness in seeing how the different kids dealt with the situation, and some interesting psychology about how fast relationships can disintegrate or intensify when put in a life-or-death scenario. Entertaining and gross, but not too deep.
The sequel started by taking the premise from the first movie and twisting it around enough to be different without being too different or a rehash. But then before we even get to the one hour mark it makes a radical departure and becomes some whole other movie. Although it had started to degrade long before that point.
There are so many problems with it, I don’t know where to begin. The original director, Kinji Fukasaku (who directed the Japanese sequences in Tora! Tora! Tora!) died in the middle of making the sequel, so it was completed by his son Kenta. Always a bad sign. There’s a whole anti-America vibe running throughout the movie that seems just really out of place and pointless, and even offensive in the wake of 9/11, which it seems to exploit. The action sequences are a mess and it’s near impossible to tell what’s going on. Unlike the first movie, all the action involves guns rather than other weapons, so you get just one gun battle after another. Hey, I get it, it’s War! There’s a totally ludicrous Saving Private Ryan beach-storming scene that was painful to watch on so many different levels. This was bad, but not in an entertaining-bad way.
When the action slows down and the characters (including one from the first movie) start talking philosophy and such, things get even worse. This is where the limitation of using child actors is really obvious. They fail to give any real weight to what they are saying (which is pretty incomprehensible). And I haven’t even touched on how no part of the plot makes any kind of sense. The premise of the first movie didn’t make much sense either, but once you bought into the premise you could just suspend disbelief and go with it. I was not able to do that with this one. Yeah, send in a bunch of untrained kids to knock out a nest of hardened terrorists – that’s a good one!
So, anyway, avoid at all costs. Bad, bad, bad. The only good thing about it was the video and sound quality on the Hong Kong DVD were very good and the movie had high production values.
Latre.