Battle Royale (2000)
Things take place in one of those ridiculous futures that only exist to set up the preposterous premise of the movie. In this case, it's the silliest one since Logan's Run. Instead of everyone dying when they hit thirty (shoot, you're already dead inside by then anyway), there's this law known as the Battle Royale Act. I wasn't terribly sure of all the provisions, but along with mandatory uniforms and probably school prayer and posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms next to the pamphlets on chlamydia and other STDs, the bill also sets up the hot new game show, Battle Royale!
Every year, one class is chosen by a random lottery to participate in Battle Royale. The class of delinquent teens is dumped off on a deserted island and told to kill each other off until there is only one survivor. To keep things chugging along, all the little twerps have these collars on them that seem to only exist in these bogus futureshock movies. You know the kind - it allows the kids to be listened to and tracked. They also have a bomb inside of them that can be detonated by HQ whenever the kids get out of control.
To spice things up even further, the kids are each given a bag of supplies, including map, compass, water, and a weapon. Each bag has a different weapon in it, some more useful than others. When you see the kid pull the lid from a pot out of his bag, you immediately regret that you dumped a sawbuck on him with your bookie.
Beat Takeshi stars as the teacher that is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. I was reading in Time Asia that Beat is one of the great superstars in Japan and just about the coolest thing going over there. Just so you know, Beat is a puffy, middle-aged dude with a scarred up face, who limps around a lot, but I do have to admit that he's got that coolly distant and disinterested look that Americans always seem to admire. In fact, a lot of the movie he spends lying around in his ugly-ass sweat suit eating the cookies that this ninth grader he has a crush on made. How much cooler can you get? Plus his nickname is "Beat!"
Beat has a little trouble relating to the kids in class because during one of the opening scenes in the movie, some punk knifes him for no apparent reason. Later it would be revealed that Beat also has problems at home (obsessing about schoolgirls while lying around in your sweat pants probably isn't the best way to keep the wife happy) and his kid even hates him, saying that his breath stinks so bad that he can smell it over the phone! Don't think I didn't file that chestnut away for future use!
Even though Beat is on worker's comp, recovering from his stab wound, he is apparently plotting his revenge. Now, I know that this is all done by random lottery, but I can't help but think that Beat made this lottery a little less random than it was supposed to be. The kids in his class are all going on a field trip and are gassed to sleep, taken to an island, and when they awake they find Beat there surrounded by Japanese military officials.
He tells them they've been selected to do this Battle Royale thing, then hauls in the substitute teacher that took his place while he was recovering. This turd was obviously a student sympathizer because he was skinny, young, and had some kind of really mod facial hair. Beat has his corpse hauled in on a stretcher to show the class that their new, young, hip teacher strenuously opposed the class' selection for Battle Royale. And that his opposition was most unsuccessful!
The kids don't seem to realize their predicament, because they are still mouthing off to Beat. These scenes are great because Beat cusses out the kids, pushes one girl around and gets mad and throws a knife clear across the room into the forehead of another girl, dropping her insolent butt on the spot! Then they all watch a video with a really perky hostess that explains the concept of Battle Royale and all the rules (40 kids walk in, one walks out!). Beat even takes the opportunity to demonstrate the death dealing power of the necklaces they're all wearing, blowing up some kid's neck that he didn't like. At this point, I realized this movie was really going to deliver on its promise to kill forty kids in spectacular fashion and I was hooked!
Once the kids get their bags of supplies and run out into the night, the rest of the movie is a big game of "who do you trust?" Are the alliances offered for real or just a ruse to get you close enough to kill? The movie then details the different fates of those involved in the game. Some kids take to this wanton killing/survival of the fittest stuff a little better than others.
One couple who are in love refuse to participate in the senseless slaughter and take the lover's leap together off of some cliffs to the rocky surf below. One girl becomes a killing machine, slicing up anyone that she can find, even if it requires her to pretend to be friends with someone first. There are also two transfer students that we learn are basically ringers. One of them is Kiriyama a dude so twisted he actually signed up voluntarily for the Battle Royale! He's got wild hair and runs around with an automatic weapon, a sword and a bullet proof vest, single-handedly killing about a third of the class. The classic moment was when he decapitated a kid that was wearing a helmet, stuck a grenade in his mouth and chucked the kid's head (still wearing the helmet!) into the building where our heroes were hiding out! You don't get to see that too often in these Japanese teen-kill movies!
The other ringer is Kawada. He actually is a Battle Royale survivor from three years ago who was drugged and taken to this game to rig things (I suppose to make sure none of Beat's student's survive. Man, is he a tough teacher!). He befriends Shuya and Norika, a boy and a girl who are just trying to survive. Shuya's parents pretty much punked out on him, with his mother somehow taking a powder and his father hanging himself, his suicide note written on buttwipe telling Shuya to "keep going on" or some such crap. Thanks for your support dad.
Shuya gets into a gun fight with Kiriyama and gets wounded pretty bad, but keeps thinking back to that day his daddy took a short walk off a long stool and limps on, determined to find Norika again, because he promised to protect her. Norika is also the girl that Beat wants to date or something because he takes time out from broadcasting over the loud speaker the list of dead classmates to walk out in the rain into the woods where Norika is kneeling over the fallen Shuya to give her an umbrella. I thought that was nice of him, especially since he stole the cookies she baked for the class trip.
The movie paces things nicely and realizes that it's going to be kind of hard to know all forty of these kids by the end of things, so after each kill, the list out the kid's sex, class number, and name as being dead and how many survivors are still around. The movie's main focus is Shuya, Norika, and Kiriyama, but they cut away to detail what is happening with the other classmates. One group is using their computer skills to hack into the computers of the people running things, another group is holed up in a lighthouse, and one guy even tries to use this "we're all going to die" angle to get himself laid. After he accidentally shoots his intended hook-up with a crossbow, she stabs him repeatedly in the nuts.
At the end, it seems that Kiriyama has just been using Shuya and Norika to assure his own survival, but there's still some double-crossing left in everyone, so you'll just have to see what happens. It involves a final confrontation with Beat, a water gun, and this really awful picture that Beat has been drawing since the Battle Royale begin. (Beat is one chopstick short of a pair.)
Some of the characters here are given enough screen time (the three protagonists mostly) that you actually want to see them survive and they're fleshed out with some well done flashbacks. The movie is really just about stylistically executed mindless slaughter though so don't expect any depth of consequence. It's the kind of entertainment that you might feel a little guilty at enjoying, if you weren't thankfully already desensitized to rampant and continuous violence. So go ahead, put your sweat suit on, bust out the Otis Spunkmeyer cookies and watch it like you know you want to. Where else are you going to see kids killing each other? (Except maybe on the news.)