Battle Royale 2 (major spoilers)

Hey, I found the worst film of the year! I mean, the year is still young and I might see something worse yet, but I seriously doubt it.

When Krabak warned me that it was very bad, I sort of assumed that he was saying that just because the movie was a lot worse than the original Battle Royale. I liked the first movie very much, and I figured the second one would be much worse but OK. I was wrong.

First of all, it was a war movie. The mother of all the awful war movies. It has a bad script, and even worse acting, and horrible pacing, too. Worst of all, it had a deep social and political message, and it did not know what it was. "Soldiers bad". "Adults bad". "Children good". "Kalashnikov good". "America bad". "Explosions good". "Government bad". "Terrorism good". "An unnamed central/south Asian country where a war has been going on for 20 years good". "Look at all the bloodshed and killing, so sad, so tragic, let's kill some more". I think this was the list of all the major points.

In the beginning the movie introduces Shuya and Noriko, the survivors from the previous movie, in such a way that makes you hope for their fast yet painful deaths (they blow up about 10 high-rise buildings in some Japanese city). Shuya and his gang, called Wild Seven but consisting of about 20 people is waging a war on all adults in the world. They are all staying on the same island where the original Battle Royale was fought, and instead of bombing them into oblivion the government sends a class of teenagers to kill them. The teenagers are given big guns and are paired off and collared. If the pair is more than 50 meters apart, the collars explode. If one dies, the other's collar explodes.

The class attacks. There is about as much shooting as in the sea-and-beach sequence of Saving Private Ryan, and deaths are about as individual. After they manage to kill off most of the class in the first 20 minutes of military action we hope for the better, but it never comes. The remaining 90 minutes of the movie consist of political statements and homeopathic warfare (at some point the remaining 10 or so survivors of the class join their forces with the Wild Seven and fight against the several hundred soldiers who attack them).

At some point Shuya tells the others about his and Noriko's visit to an unnamed central/south Asian country where the war had been going on for the last 20 years but where people smile proudly, and in the end the Wild Seven survivors end up in this paradise on earth. I have a feeling that they meant Afghanistan, but this impression is somewhat spoiled by women wearing skimpy colorful little scarves as opposed to burqas, and cars driving on the wrong side of the road, which made me think of Pakistan. OTOH, maybe in the movie's alternative universe it's Pakistan that has been at war for the last 20 years. Or maybe Kashmir...