Filmmakers have been posed a question for many years. How do you brutally murder 42 mouthy and unruly teenagers in a film and not cause the biggest public outcry since the Rodney King “asked for it”. Easy. Instead of having some adult murder them, which would cause a bigger uproar than Natural Born Killers by a factor of 10, get the kids to kill each other. Fucking genius. Now this brings up it’s own moral questions but what the fuck?
Here’s the deal, It’s Japan sometime in the near future, the economy if fucked no hope etc and as a result kids have become so disrespectful to their elders that the powers that be pass a law called Battle Royale. Once a year, one class of 9th graders is selected at random then drugged and taken to an Island. The kids are then forced to kill each other. Last one standing gets to go free. The sucker punch is that they’ve all got neckbands on which explode if
a)If they try to take them off
b) Try to escape
c) The time limit of 3 days expires and more than one person is left alive.
d) If you stray into one of the designated danger zones.
Always a winning ploy, I think you’ll find!
Their old teacher gets to oversee proceedings and happily tells them who’s died and when over the islands Tannoy system.
Now, you’ve got to remember that there’s 42 young actors here so some of the acting is a bit on the ropey side (particularly the psycho kid who if he actually shot like that couldn’t hit a cows arse with a banjo) and some of the dialogue, particularly during the “love” scenes is a little bit cheesy but so fuck. 42 teenagers, shot, pummelled, poisoned, hacked to death so basically who cares.
People will say it steals from Lord Of The Flies, and various other films but my favourite directors, The Coen Brothers are the biggest burglars of all time, so I don’t really care. You’ll probably read other reviews that contain phrases like “Damning Indictment Of Society” but all you need to know is the kids buy it, BIG TIME.
This film contains one of my all time top ten ways I don’t want to bite the dust. It probably contains one of yours aswell.
While not as funny as Series 7 (although the training video section is highly amusing) it is more bloodthirsty and out of the two I would say I preferred Battle Royale (just) but if you watched Series 7 and liked it then there’s a good chance you’ll like this.
Ruthless Ratings
- Story – 10 Teenagers Die!!!
- Direction – 6 or 7
- Acting – 3’s through 7’s and 9 for the Teacher guy
- Number of times you wished it was a load of Lardy assed burger munching
- Yankee brats getting ruthlessly fucked over – 86
- Number Of Times You Ignored The Bad Acting – 10
- Number Of Times You Wished Battle Royale Was Coming To A School Near You – 666