K-SCORE: 13
Writer/Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Spoiler Level: Moderate
Battle Royale is the Japanese Hunger Games. Though I suppose it’s more accurate to call The Hunger Games an American Battle Royale. Any which way you look at it, it’s all bad.
This film sets up forty-two children to murder one another in a bloody competition on a remote island. Forty-two! Whittled down to one in a two hour time block. You can’t have character development with those kinds of numbers, so you’re just watching for the intriguing nature of their deaths, debating internally whether it’s your genetics or your upbringing that twisted your psyche such that it’s drawn to such disturbing premises. Sadly, very few of the Japanese adolescents actually stumble into fascinating demises. (Doubly sadly, you’re not going to learn the answer to that personal nature/nurture question.) A few of the kids are highly trained assassins. The island is all set up with hazardous traps. The organization responsible for these games looks ready for some brutal young people murder. So there’s a lot of wonderful potential for creative murder. Yay! Yet none of it really happens. Aw. It’s dissatisfying. Imagine just watching a couple score Asian kids get shot with machine guns and you get the idea - you know, because that’s a healthy place for your imagination.
Both Avram's malformed soul and mine were unimpressed.