Not only is the violence in Crows Zero blithely brutal and untrammeled by morals or conscience (for the Suzuran delinquents seem to have none), but the fight sequences occur with a length and frequency that brook no debate about Miike’s not-so-ulterior motives as director. Shun pauses in mild surprise - then nonchalantly turns away while the boy crumples cartoonishly to the floor, the dart sticking from his brow. In another scene, Oguri Shun’s character, while learning to play darts with his new buddies, inadvertently lands one of his little projectiles in the dead center of another student’s forehead. The characters revel in the mutual hostilities with a casualness that will turn off - nauseate, even - viewers unaccustomed to director Miike’s ultra-violent style and wicked sense of humor: in one scene on the baseball field, a player swings his bat a bit too vigorously and accidentally bashes a teammate’s skull, a mishap that elicits no more than a flippant “Oops, my bad” reaction from the offending party.
The violence in both Crows Zeros is almost bacchanalian, each scene a “wild rumpus” among hot-blooded male youths determined to take the term “school spirit” to a whole new level. “ Looks like we’ve come to one crazy school.”ĭrawing from the same cosmos as the immensely popular comics “Crows” and “Worst” by Takashi Hiroshi, the Crows Zero films unapologetically eschew the conventional fixtures of high school life – the classes, books, and teachers’ dirty looks, lol – for a combined four-hour slugfest in the mucky fields and graffitied corridors of the Serizawa All-Boys’ High School. The biggest obstacle to Genji’s mission happens to be Suzuran’s strongest and most dangerous punk Serizawa Tamao and his head-bashing posse of high school hoods. His mission? To vanquish the rival student gangs one by one and earn the title of Suzuran’s top dog – er, crow – and thus prove to his yakuza boss of a father that he has what it takes to inherit the family business. Senior toughie Takiya Genji transfers to the notoriously lawless Suzuran All-Boys’ High School. Oguri Shun, Yamada Takayuki, Yabe Kyosuke, Kiritani Kenta, Takaoka Sousuke, Kaneko Nobuaki, Miura Harumaĭirected by Miike Takashi / Toho Company, 2007 & 2009 Korean director Kim Tae-gyun and Japanese filmmaker Miike Takashi tender two alternate interpretations of this proposition with Volcano High and the Crows Zeros, respectively - all diverting, popcorn-friendly fare, but each bearing the unique and heavily stylized stamp of its maker. The school setting isn’t really the point films like these get made so that teen audiences - ah, those intense little creatures! - can live out their aggressive, hormone-fueled fantasies that continually chafe (futilely, it seems to them) against the carefully imposed strictures of a traditionalistic, “adults rule” society. To describe these types of productions (most rating not lower than PG-15 or its equivalent) as being “about high school life” is like saying that Titanic was about the, um, iceberg. The fact that these stories are set on a high school campus lends a patina of harmlessness to the violent scenarios - even though the plot actually has less to do with academics than with a bunch of overgrown kids fond of rearranging each others’ faces and dislocating random body parts as their after-school routine.
You need only transplant the barroom brawling and gangsta-mongering from mainstream action flicks into the tamer, more innocuous environs of an educational institution, and voila! – Battlefield High School. Planet Earth is one too, according to John Travolta’s alien Psychlo character from his 2000 intergalactic flop.Īaaand… so is high school, apparently – a premise that has spawned an entire genre of teen action comedy/dramedy on screens big and small. Love is a battlefield, as Pat Benatar lustily declared in her 1983 song.
Get a taste of high school action, J- and K-style. A murder of Crows, a violent eruption of teen superpowers… and oh yes, those epic dogfights in the pelting rain and churning mud.
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