(Originally posted on 2/24/04)
A metaphor for adolescent angst? A satiric look at 21st century Japanese society? Or merely a twisted, trashy black comedy about kids forced to murder each other? Either way, Kinji Fukasaku’s hilariously energetic Battle Royale -- a jazzed-up hybrid of Lord of the Flies, The Running Man, and “Survivor†based on the novel by Koshun Takami -- races along with the swift, brutal precision of a samurai sword cutting through cotton. In a dystopian near-future plagued by delinquent kids and skyrocketing unemployment, Japan decides to perform some corrective surgery on its population by placing one class of students each year on a remote island, giving each boy and girl a weapon and a map, and having them play a three-day game of “last man standing.†The kids -- nerds, outcasts, drop-outs, bullies, sweethearts, and various other high school archetypes -- either ruthlessly embrace the game’s kill or be killed ethos or simply refuse to participate by committing suicide. Fukasaku’s film has a throbbing, bloodthirsty verve, and the sports ticker text that announces each kid’s death (and provides a count of how many are still alive) gives the action its chilling gallows humor. In gauzy flashbacks, we witness the kids’ turbulent former lives -- Shuya (Tatsuya Fujiwara) lives in a foster home because his mother ran away and his father committed suicide, while bitchy elitist Mitsuko (Kou Shibasaki) battled a drunken, whorish mother and her pedophilic paramour -- and this underlying portrait of parental neglect becomes a possible explanation for Japan’s youth run wild. Takeshi “Beat†Kitano is creepily transfixing as the former teacher who nominates the kids for Battle Royale, and even if his character’s motivations are frustratingly underdeveloped, the film’s delirious bloodlust washes over most of the screenplay’s deficiencies. The “fight the power†ending is disingenuously optimistic and one-sided, but Fukasaku’s Battle Royale nonetheless provides an acute depiction of the way in which self-preservation instincts amplify teenagers’ already fickle notions of friendship, loyalty, and love.
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