Number Two
Recently, Akira Kurosawa's son gave the go-ahead for a PS2 game called Seven Samurai 20XX to be made. Unremarkable though it may be, the game's just another vanilla entry in the hack'n'slash action-adventure genre. However, tying it into the classic movie Seven Samurai is on par with beating a dead gift horse in the mouth: a disgusting joke that I would never have expected from a country that professes such reverence for its elders.

A joke that's still not funny in Battle Royale 2.

What is funny is how much I was looking forward to this nearly a year ago. It's also amusing considering how much originality is touted among moviegoers; the only thing the sequel to Battle Royale had to be was more of the same: more gore, more strong characterization, more subtle social commentary. After all, it’s considered the definitive Japanese cult movie for a generation of people discovering that niche, and fueled the rise of several stars like Chiaki “GoGo Yubari” Kuriyama. Yet a continuation of a novel cautionary tale like that is tantamount to making a Fight Club video game.

Better Off Dead

See, you should be watching this instead.

An obvious warning should have been when veteran director Kinji Fukasaku (who also worked on a PS2 game: the third entry in the Clock Tower series) died during production. His influence from behind the camera in the first Battle Royale now missing, his son Kenta took up the mantle of director in what was considered an honorable move. How was anyone to know that what would evolve from this would be an even more disappointing tragedy than The Phantom Menace?

Here, a quote from Preacher, Garth Ennis’ seminal graphic novel series seems to write itself onto the page:

"What they should have done was wept.
For the world.
And for the future."

I've never been one to believe in divine intervention, but perhaps there was a reason that Fukasaku-san passed away before the film could be completed. Watching Battle Royale 2 for a fan of the original is like living through the closing minutes of the un-Marky-Marked Planet of the Apes. As its runtime wears on, so, too does the temptation to sink to one’s knees and damn to hell the maniacs that blew it up.

Wild Zeroes
Several years after the previous Battle Royale, the movie opens on two skyscrapers being detonated and collapsing. Thought that kind of 9/11 symbolism was passé by 10/01? Answer: too bad. While the audience is still reeling from such a broad slap in the face, a broadcast comes up of Japanese teens dressed in suspiciously well-manufactured desert wear.

Their leader declares them to be the terrorist group 'Wild Seven' claiming responsibility for the attack. Those who aren’t shaking their heads in disbelief at this point will soon join the others once a look past the Old Navy Pullover Camelfleece, hot dog tan and deliberately styled hair reveals Shinji, the whimpering manchild lead in the previous movie with his girl Noriko strangely absent...though honestly, can you blame her?

Saving Private Nanahara

Wayne Newton's ads for Slim Jims were a dismal failure.

Of course more cars must be added to this pileup, and there’s a school whole football field full of ‘em. Again, those familiar with the Director’s Cut of Battle Royale will recognize the spiritual successor of the final basketball game with the students before they descend into their survival horror nightmare, but this time they’re playing rugby. Fucking rugby, okay? What the fuck? Did Fukasaku-san eat it before he had time to order the cricket equipment?

Rugby. I swear to God.

From the field, the students are then hustled aboard a bus on their class field trip where they are drugged unconscious -- the only time in the movie you’ll envy them. Waking up on a military base amid a swarm of paparazzi, the class of BR '02 is then paired boy/girl with exploding collars, given the loudest camouflage gear outside of 50 Cent’s fall clothing line, and enlisted in a sting operation to bring down Shinji’s Wild Seven holed up on the abandoned island from the first movie. Again, the sequel’s not content to be shitty by itself but keeps dragging its progenitor into this mess.

Shin-Jeez

BRII Magic Eye Painting Challenge: Stare at this until you can see good actors.

Saved By The Battle: The New Cast is introduced rather quickly, as if whoever behind the camera at this time was acknowledging that they knew this lot was a shipment of trick talking meat bankrupt of even a sliver of charisma. There are only two reasons that someone can be considered memorable in this film: bad hair and worse acting. The main ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ have both.

The game’s new annoying protagonist (just what this movie needed, two Shinjis) has a mop of bottle blond hair and a breathless stare of righteous indignation that makes him look like a cartoon moose in heat. His nemesis, this year's teacher is played by Riki Takeuchi of Takashi Miike’s Dead Or Alive trilogy who gloats, mugs, and shrieks as though he were channeling Al Pacino with a cocaine migraine.

The only character remotely exempt from this rule is a student who's supposed to be the daughter of Beat Takeshi's sadistic yet humorous teacher, who audiences heard browbeat her father by mobile phone in the previous movie. We're supposed to believe that she joined the Battle Royale willingly to exact revenge on Shinji and interpret her puffy-faced sulking as being cool and aloof.

Royale With Cheese
Come to think of it, the viewer is expected to believe quite a bit -- that Shinji became a charismatic rebel leader (that may be the greatest purgery I've ever typed in my time writing for NewMoanYeah) under the auspices of Sonny Chiba. That the Japanese military would send in high-school children into a rip-off of Saving Private Ryan while they have a highly skilled assault team that ends up going in anyway.

Believe that the gobbets of CGI blood straight out of Beat Takeshi's Zatoichi remake DON'T make the film look like a banned Gushers Fruit Snacks ad.

Most embarassingly you're expected to believe this movie was a cold hard look at 'who the real terrorists are in the War on Terror'. Like the Metal Gear Solid series (also cursed with a disappointing sequel), the broad yet subtle surgical look at society present in Battle Royale has been traded in for a dildo with WAR IS BAD written on the side of it, which BR2 shows little restraint in using as a bludgeon.

War. What Is It Good For?
Somehow, amongst the gratuitous mortality rate and moralizing the movie forgot that for the most part, its preaching to the choir is the same as shelling a surrendering village -- WE GET THE IDEA ALREADY. Nevertheless the bunch of jackoffs comprising the cast & crew circle around the audience for the cinematic equivalent of bukkake.

It’s a shame that the successors of Akira Kurosawa and Kinji Fukasaku are a pair of gigolo necrophiliac fatherfuckers content to rape their sire's landmark works, making the worst thing that can happen to a dead Japanese movie director his son. Someone alert Hayao Miyazaki before he dies and some plagiaristic egocentric relative unleashes Spirited Away With A Vengeance and Princess Mononoke 1 ½ directly to home video for some quick cash.

Assuming the point was to show that war is pointless, mission accomplished; but there are faster and more entertaining ways to do it. The only way your suspension of disbelief will keep aloft during this torture session is on a hangman's noose. If you still believe in anything, though, best believe that both those who have and haven't seen the first Battle Royale follow the advice of the first film and run! Stick with the original and the manga, because if this movie were any more retarded the copies of the DVD would be delivered by short yellow buses.

On the web: The Battle Royale II 2-DVD all region set at Poker Industries