Battle Royale II: Requiem (Kenta Fukasaku, Kinji Fukasaku, 2003)

Cast: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Ai Maeda, Shugo Oshinari, Ayana Sakai, Haruka Suenaga, Yuma Ishigaki, Miyuki Kanbe, Nana Yanagisawa, Masaya Kikawada, Yōko Maki, Yuki Ito, Natsuki Kato, Aki Maeda. Riki Takeuchi, Sonny Chiba. Screenplay: Kenta Fukasaku, Norio Kida. Cinematography: Toshihiro Isomi. Production design: Emiko Tsuyuki. Film editing: Hirohide Abe. Music: Masamichi Amano. 

I suspect that anyone watching Battle Royale II: Requiem after the Hamas attack on Israel will have a different reaction to it than those who watched it before. It's a movie in which the heroes are terrorists: We even get a repeated shot in which they blow up two identical tall buildings. The first Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000) was an easy movie to get caught up in because it was fast and often funny, and the premise of a government of an overpopulated Japan selecting teenagers to kill off one another in a televised game show format was ridiculous enough that you could easily distance yourself from the movie. But the sequel, begun by Kinji Fukasaku but completed after his death by his son, Kenta, isn't so inventive, and the heroic terrorist premise is hard to swallow. It reunites some of the survivors of the earlier film's massacre who are part of a worldwide crusade against adults in general. This time, they're holed up on the island where they fought in the earlier film, and a class of ninth graders from a Japanese middle school for troubled kids is forced to storm the island and defeat the terrorists. But once they land on the island, after a sequence obviously designed to remind the viewer of the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), the would-be attackers join forces with the terrorists and turn against the government. The rest is a series of war movie scenes as the government returns fire. The borrowing from other movies is pervasive: The film's climax, for example, is a direct lift from the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969). The teacher of the students chosen for the assault is wildly overplayed by Riki Takeuchi, who delivers a blistering anti-American speech before sending the kids off to fight. In general, it's a muddled film, not only politically but also in its failure to present clearly delineated characters in whom we can invest some emotional commitment and in the overall lack of suspense about their fates.