Battle Royale 2 - Requiem [DVD] [2003]

Things start off with a bang - literally, making 9/11 look like a party popper as Tokyo is brought to the ground by the Wild Seven terrorist group, led by BR survivor Shuya Nanahara. Here, the premise is set up - war has been declared against adults, but the adults don't want to play. This time, the students are selected to storm their hideout, and waste anyone and everyone there.

Of course, the ante has to be upped to avoid a repeat of the first film. And this is done on two levels. Firstly, the action is explosive, visceral and breathtaking, tearing a page from the storyboards of Saving Private Ryan, and upping the adrenaline to make an insane sequence as the students storm the beach. Secondly, crucially, there is a slight alteration to the collars - every student has an opposite, Boys #3 and Girls #3, for example. And if one of them dies in whatever circumstances, the other collar is set to blow as well. Naturally, these combine to get the bodycount off to a sprint start, with 18 (EIGHTEEN!) students dead in the space of a few short minutes. But this is where the main problem of BR2 lies - you don't care about the dead students (you don't even know their names until the post mortem roll call), so your reaction isn't shock, it's to look at the screen and go "Cool!"

Compared with the first film, this is a serious lack. In the first, you actually cared about the students and what happened to them, as they were fleshed out and had their own back stories - be it Shuya, Kawada, Mimura, Nobu, Chigusa or fan-favourite Kiriyama. Here, the only character that resonates is Kitano's daughter, which says how ineffective a male lead Takuma is. It also highlights the other major loss from the first film - Takeshi Kitano is only in one scene of the film, rather than casually stealing it as he did first time. Takashi Miike regular Riki Takeuchi tries to fill the void, and brings some menace to his character, but was on to a losing battle from the start, while Sonny Chiba's role as Mimura's uncle is too short to mean much. If the characters were just shooting each other for a couple of hours, this might not be as notable, but long stretches of the film are just the characters reflecting and contemplating - but it just doesn't wash, for the basic reason they aren't characters, merely archetypes.

Yes, the film redeems itself towards the end with an intense, drawn out battle between Wild Seven and Special Forces, as well as a hilarious sequence with the Japanese PM arguing with Takeuchi and some non-too flattering allusions to the US, but it doesn't work in the way it clearly should. And the rugby allegory is plain criminal.

As a testament to Kinji Fukasaku's career (he died during filming, and son Kenta took over), it doesn't seem to be a fitting send off. It may fail to miserably fail to live up to the first film, and does not favour considerably, but it does stand up on some of its points and sequences. However, it is not as bad as the hardcore BR fans and critics alike make it out to be. Worth satisfying your curiosity with, if nothing more.

There are plenty of good points to this sequel, but it really does have something missing - Takeshi Kitano for a start. The teacher in Requiem really does take overacting to a new level! What is really missing is the sense of shock and surprise. The film is slow to start because it covers the same ground in that we see a group of kids at their school, then on a bus at the end of the year, then getting gassed and waking up in a base camp and getting the orientation speech from their teacher. While the kids might be surprised at all this, the audience is not - they saw it all in Battle Royale so the scene where packs are given out seems to go on forever.

The premise of the first film was a bit shaky, but we overlooked that for the sake of enjoyment. In this case its just plain bizarre: a terrorist who has destroyed half of Tokyo (Nanahara from the first film) is hiding on an island. The government knows exactly where they are so instead of just sending in the SAS or bombing the place to the ground or anything easy like that, they send in forty or so untrained schoolchildren. In case that is too easy they put limitations on the kids by making pairing them up so that their heads get blown off if they stray more than 50m from each other. In case that was not hard enough they still impose arbitrary 'danger zones' and send the kids in without ammunition and parachute that in separately, right into the line of fire, which was the point where willing suspension of disbelief became impossible.

However, once the action starts, you do get wrapped up in it. The beach landing is a non-too-subtle homage to Saving Private Ryan, even using the same grainy, jumpy camera effect. The battle scenes are bloodthirsty, with effective use of the surround sound channels to add even more zip to them.

Unfortunately good action is not enough to sustain a film entirely and when the action lets up so does the interest level because the characters are just not as engaging. Even the action get a bit stale as there is not the variety this time round - every kid has the a gun so its all shooting and gun battles, so while the effects seem more bloody than in Battle Royale (especially the collar explosions), there is none of the inventiveness. The little bit of anti-American politics, while probably valid, is shoe-horned into the plot.

Maybe its all just a cultural thing, and the story, style and acting on this do not translate as well for a European mindset, but I felt this film did not live up to expectations.

If I had to describe BR:II in three words id say, entertaining (in a "point and laugh at it" kind of way), unnecessary, and very very silly. BR:II is unnecessary because BR ended so perfectly, with a good message to end on, this film was made just to milk the money cow a few more dollars (or yen) from a very popular movie. The movie itself starts okay, the start is very similar to the original, a load of kids are one day away from finishing school, then they're drugged and taken to a military complex and forced to participate in a death game called Battle Royale. The main change this time is all the kids have to work together to kill a national terrorist (Nanhara Shuya, a winner from a previous Battle Royale game). Also they are given a partner to look out for, if their partner dies, they die (with the help of the trusty exploding neck collar). It's a good idea to add something new like that, but we're literally five minutes into the game and ten of the kids have died already. The film is actually quite exciting, then when the pupils join Shuya's militant faction the plot just dissolves into a load fake philosophical babble.

While this film dose have its entertaining battle scenes early on, there are loads of pointers which really let this film down. Firstly the acting, these kids seem more like really big BR fans than actual actors, it seems like they're trying really hard to come close the actors from the original, but decide they'll shout a little louder to make it seem more emotional. The teacher, what the hell were they thinking! His acting is, well melodramatic to say the least, Kitano (the teacher from the original) did seem a little crazy but it worked brilliantly, this teacher is crazy, but its more like a "six year old on sugar acting silly on purpose" crazy. Also Shuya, for a start he's actually in the movie (not a good start) he runs a terrorist fraction (oh dear) composed of all kids against adults and the BR law (original) who blew up a load of buildings on christmas day as a terrorist act (aren't they just kids?) and now he's a spiritual know-it-all who uses a walking stick, is always surrounded by candles and can solve all your problems with a long speech with long words which have no relevance to what he's actually talking about. This film is also very long, its over two hours, and when your about one hour thirty minutes into it your thinking "Christ! How far can they drag this dead horse!"

If you're a big BR fan, this film isn't really that bad, and it does have its good moments, but all in all this couldn't be father from what the original Battle Royale was all about. Oh, and don't mention the blatant "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" rip off near the end, had me in stitches till the end of the film.