Movie Review - Battle Royale

Battle Royale (2000)

Directed by Kinji Fukasaku

I'd heard of Battle Royale for years, but the thoughts of it came to light again after the release of this year's Hunger Games which takes many of this Japanese film's concepts and dilutes them down to a teen-friendly entertainment destination.  While there are certainly differences -- the biggest being that the Hunger Games series spends more time outside of the battlegrounds whereas Battle Royale solely focuses on the kill-or-be-killed war zone -- the similarities in premise are eerily similar.  In the end, however, when weighing the pros and cons of each film, they come out about even and I'd honestly be hard-pressed to say which one I like better.

It's the new millennium and, in order to keep unruly teens in line, the Japanese government decides that every year it's going to take a classroom of ninth graders, place them on an island, and force them to fight each other to the death in something called Battle Royale.  Somehow, this is supposed to keep teens in check, however, I'm not quite sure how randomly choosing thirty or so kids is going to solve greater problems in Japanese culture.  [The dystopian dynamics of the Hunger Games and the government's influences on its people are much better detailed.]  Still, only one can come out alive and it's certainly amusing to see these kids begin to turn on each other.

Battle Royale is absolutely bloody...laughably so.  But that's really the point.  There's an over-the-top quality here and realism is not something that is even in the dictionary of director Kinji Fukasaku.  And that's not necessarily a bad thing.  It gives the otherwise simplistic storyline a reason to exist while also allowing for the often overacting teens to showcase as extravagant and overdramatic deaths as possible.

This isn't great cinema, but I was hoping for something a little more than what it has to give.  I must admit that I began watching this one evening and got about halfway through and had to stop for the night despite the fact that I was enjoying the campiness of the whole flick.  The next day, I started the movie and found myself almost bored.  Death after death occurs (and we see nearly all of the kills onscreen) and it almost gets tedious.  Still, Battle Royale is fun...a term I wouldn't necessarily use to describe The Hunger Games.  They both have their plusses and minuses, but in the end, they're about the same in terms of effectiveness.

The RyMickey Rating:  B-