I heard some great things about Battle Royale among which Quentin Tarantino named it his favorite movie since 1992 and it has become a full-blown cult movie so I decided to give this a try. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku, Battle Royale is set in a near-futuristic dystopian Japan where the economy is doing poorly and teenage delinquency is out of control. To remedy this situation, the Japanese government authorized a special game through the BR Act. A randomly chosed class of junior high school students is sent to a deserted island and forced to play a lethal survival game. The rules of this game are fairly simple: The students have a detonating necklace around their neck. They have three days to kill everyone else and be the only one left or all the necklaces will be detonated. The necklaces will also be detonated if the children wander into “danger zones” or try to get off the island. Each of the students receive a bag with some survival supplies and a random weapon which can range from a machine gun to a pair of binocular.

Needless to say the body count incrementally goes up to insanely high numbers. It’s interesting to see how the director explored the dilemma at work here. Some students immediately turn against each other while others team up for survival. Performance-wise, the teen actors did a great job. Battle Royale is truly unique in a way because you will never see a movie like this being made in the US. The violence is way over the top and you would never see a movie about children pitted against each other in life or death situation in our politically-correct world and given the number of school shooting we have seen the last few years… There is some truly sick but hilarious moments in this movie like the video presentation where a lady gayly presents the rules of the game to the stunned and terrified group of kids who just saw one of their classmate get his head blown off for a necklace demonstration.

Kill or be killed! Battle Royale is a kick ass movie!

A

Note: Extreme violence