Stylistically it's a beauty, with khaki-uniformed waifs fighting for their lives to a crashing classical score.
Battle Royale
Could you kill your best friend?
2000 · 1h 54m · Not Rated
Action, Drama, Thriller
Directed by
Kinji Fukasaku
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Battle Royale
Overview
In the future, the Japanese government captures a class of ninth-grade students and forces them to kill each other under the revolutionary "Battle Royale" act.
Director and cast
- Kinji Fukasaku Director
- Tatsuya Fujiwara as Shuya Nanahara (Boy #15)
- Aki Maeda as Noriko Nakagawa (Girl #15)
- Takeshi Kitano as Kitano
- Taro Yamamoto as Shogo Kawada (Boy #5)
- Masanobu Ando as Kazuo Kiriyama (Boy #6)
- Ko Shibasaki as Mitsuko Souma (Girl #11)
- Chiaki Kuriyama as Takako Chigusa (Girl #13)
- Takashi Tsukamoto as Shinji Mimura (Boy #19)
- Sousuke Takaoka as Hiroki Sugimura (Boy #11)
- Yukihiro Kotani as Yôshitoki Kuninobu (Boy #7)
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
Awful deaths (and hysterical reactions to them) punctuate declarations of love and friendship, revelations of treachery and heavily armed expressions of angst.
Forgive the film its small flaws of histrionic performances and cheap execution for the giddy rush of its banal, Verhoevenesque atmosphere...
It may suit a certain worldview, but Battle Royale's cynicism is still a form fantasy-a balm as well as a bomb.
3D conversion of a classic teen massacre thriller raises the gore level.
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