Originally posted on 4/26/21
Are you one of the many people who, over the years, have liked or even loved the classic 2000 dystopian action thriller BATTLE ROYALE? Well, for better or worse, there's a sequel.
The original BATTLE ROYALE begins at the dawn of the 21st century in a Japan whose society is falling apart. With thousands of students boycotting school and youth violence and unemployment at an all-time high, the fascist government "bigwigs" pass the BR (Battle Royale) Act in hopes of curbing juvenile delinquency.
Thus, a graduating ninth-grade class is chosen at random once a year, taken to a deserted island, and forced to fight each other to the death until there's only one survivor. If more than one person is alive at the end of three days, they all die via their nifty exploding necklaces.
After enjoying the first film so much, I was filled with keen anticipation for its follow-up, a feeling that BATTLE ROYALE II: REQUIEM (2003) didn't quite live up to. It may not be the worst sequel to a good movie that I've ever seen--MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME and EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC are more worthy contenders for that title--but my socks were in little danger of getting knocked off while watching it.
It's three years after the end of the first story, with Shuya (Tatsuya Fujiwara), the main student character from the first movie, now a notorious terrorist waging war on the world's adult population from his island bunker.
We meet a new BR class who will be the first to go into battle under new rules--storm Shuya's island, engage him and his followers in combat, and kill him (with extreme prejudice) within 72 hours.
This time the participants are paired up boy-girl, and if one dies or wanders more than fifty meters away from the other, both collars explode. All of this is explained to our group of cowering students by a new and much more hostile teacher, Takeuchi Riki, who hams it up with such unbridled ferocity that you wouldn't be surprised if he started hammering nails with his eyeballs.
Instead of the free-for-all competition for survival we got in the first movie, this one starts out as a fun, but somewhat average war flick made interesting mainly because it's a bunch of terrified ninth graders doing the fighting.
The island siege is filmed like a junior version of the Omaha Beach sequence from SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, only with sloppier editing and lots more Shaky-Cam. It plays a little like something you might see on the SyFy Channel, but with a bigger budget and extra helpings of entertaining violence generously slathered on top.
(One thing that had me wondering, though--why, if the government wants these kids to take out Shuya, do they continue to make things hard for them with the boy-girl collar thing and by continuing the red-zone policy from the first movie?)
Eventually, of course, we meet Shuya, who now sports a bleached-blonde mullet, has evolved into a brooding, full-of-himself bore with messianic delusions, and seems to be mired in a perpetual state of resentful adolescence.
Apparently, we're meant to sympathize with Shuya in his amorphous battle against "the adults" which he fights by blowing up several skyscrapers (two of which bear a distinct resemblance to the World Trade Center) as the film waxes poetic about how noble and romantic terrorism can be if committed by a cool guy like Shuya.
This, along with some annoying, holier-than-thou anti-American sentiments thrown in for good measure, constitutes the sort of blobby, self-important political hogwash that bogs the movie down for much of its running time.
Even when the government sends in its crack commando forces to eradicate the terrorists once and for all (which had me wondering why they didn't just do this in the first place), the furious battle action is diluted by gobs of maudlin sentiment, mawkish dialogue, and some unintentionally funny dramatic touches that may have you either wincing in pain or rolling on the floor laughing.
Every time one of the "good guy" characters gets mortally wounded, all the intense fighting around them comes to a dead stop so they can perform a dramatic dying speech while Shuya reacts with renewed grief and outrage.
Even at this point we still get the same death count intertitles but by now the "battle royale" concept has been so thoroughly diluted that they only serve to remind us how the movie we wanted to watch in the first place never actually happened.
In addition to the wildly overacting Takeuchi Riki, Shûgo Oshinari also lays it on pretty thick as the the leader of the student warriors, Taku. Ai Maeda does a nice job as Shiori, daughter of hostile teacher Kitano (Beat Tageshi) from the first film, who volunteers for the BR in order to come to terms with what she believes was her father's murder.
Tageshi returns briefly in a touching flashback that shows his character in a more sympathetic light. The rest of the performances cover a pretty wide range from good to not so good, with Sonny Chiba doing a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo.
While it certainly has its share of bloody, shoot-em-up action and a couple of good dramatic moments here and there, BATTLE ROYALE II: REQUEIM ultimately comes across as an ill-conceived, wrongheaded, and sometimes just plain silly affair that qualifies more as a guilty pleasure than the follow-up to a classic. In its attempts to be an emotionally powerful and thematically grandiose dystopian epic, it teeters precipitously on the verge of embarrassing itself.
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