Who is the Audience for This Movie?

Fans of violent movies that deal with difficult issues.

What I Liked About This Movie

Battle Royale’s concept is very interesting. On the surface the main idea driving the movie is survival at all costs but underneath that is a look at relationships that are formed between teenagers in a school environment. Battle Royale makes you think about what you would do if you had the opportunity to get revenge on a person who bullied you in school or if you had to turn on your best friends to survive.

Action and violence is abundant in this movie but it is so over the top and ruthless it is hard to take it seriously. The over the top feeling ends up working in the movies favor because without it this could have been a very heavy handed movie with very little entertainment value. Considering the number of children they needed in this movie the acting is not that bad.

What Didn’t Work For Me

The concept behind the movie may be interesting but the execution is poor to say the least. Students back stories are either underdeveloped or poorly done. I almost felt they should have set up all of the relationships between the students and then put them into the Battle Royale. Doing that would have given the film the emotional weight it was severely missing.

While I said the acting wasn’t bad the dialogue spoken by the actors is. I understand that it was dialogue you would expect a 14 or 15 year old to say but I never knew people when I was that age that spoke as lame as many of the characters in this movie do.

My major grip though is the ending. Lately I have had the problem with many Asian movies where it seems like they don’t know when to end. The movie gets to a point when you think “yah that’s fitting for the story” then keeps going into useless scenes that really lessen the impact of the ending.

Should You Watch This Movie?

Battle Royale could have been an extraordinary movie but ends up being fairly average.

My Rating (Out of 13)