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Shuya, a survivor from the Battle Royale game three years
ago, has declared war against all adults and the adults have
decided to bring in a new school class for the new game,
Battle Royale 2. This time, 42 high school graduates are
forced to battle against Shuya and his team on an island
where Shuya has his base. The only differences between
the old and the new game is that this time the students
don't have to kill eachother, they have to kill the enemies,
and also, this time everyone's teamed up with a partner of
the opposite sex. As soon as one of the two in a team dies,
the other one's necklace automatically activates itself.
Finally the long awaited sequel for the masterpiece Battle
Royale is here. Before I begin my review I just have to say
that I think that Battle Royale is one of the best movies
ever made and I would have without a doubt given it the best
rating. So anyhow, Battle Royale 2 has gotten quite a bad
reputation and ofcourse I had my prejudices against this
sequel so I kind of went in knowing what to expect. Well,
I was prepared for something worse than the original but I
thought that it would be a pretty impossible mission to
top the original so it might be pretty okay if you think
about it as a stand-alone movie, but this was just bad, period.
Kinji Fukasaku has decided to trash the horror concept
completely this time and goes for nothing but action, action
and more action in this movie. All right so it might be fun to
watch a couple of action scenes, after all, the original had
quite a lot of action aswell. It's just that, this movie
had nothing BUT action! The story was terrible and the acting
wasn't exactly excellent either. Tatsuya, playing Shuya
should never have agreed to star in this movie since it made
me lose a whole lot of respect for him as an actor. Another
thing that disturbed me was, you never really got to know
the characters, and the ones that you did get to know got
killed, I mean what the hell was that all about.
As you might hear, I was not satisfied at all with this sequel.
It opens up very similar to its predecessor actually, with
the exact same soundtrack and some piano music. I don't know,
it all just felt very poorly executed. Also, they've decided
to make us suffer as long as possible with this movie with
a running time of over 2 hours. Come on, do they really expect
people to put up with non-stop action for over 120 minutes.
I was really disappointed with this movie but I still felt that
it had a few qualities, just don't ask me what they were since
I have no idea.
Since they decided to trash the horror concept and just go
for action, all we get are some bloody gunshots and quite
a few neck explosions. The goriest thing we got was when a
guy got a pipe through the stomach, which sounds a whole
lot gorier than it really was.
Very similar to its predecessors soundtrack, the only thing
different here was that they had changed the classical music
to Silent Night and added some piano music to create some kind
of dramatic atmosphere. It works but it's nothing new.
I don't mind sequels as long as they're all right and could
have been good as stand-alone movies but this was just bad.
My advice would have to be to stay away from this reaker and
watch the original again as this will just make you
frustrated and might make your feelings about the original
a bit more negative. However, if you like hundreds of
explosions and gunshots, go ahead, at least it sounds nice
in your home cinema system.
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