Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on May 2014

It’s not often three iconic entities come together in one hyper-violent Japanese high school bad boy beat-em-up. But that’s what we have here. This film is based on the popular 1990s manga series, Crows, by Hiroshi Takahashi, a comic that led to two films—Crows Zero, (2007) and Crows Zero II (2009)—directed by the king of schlocky bloodletting, Takashi Miike. Apparently, the producers wanted something different from Miike’s semi-parody torture-violence so this time turned to Toshiaki Toyoda, renowned for kick-starting (or re-imagining, depending on your point of view) the extremely brutal high school genre with Aoi Haru (Blue Spring, 2001). With Toyoda taking Miike’s place, the piece assumes a more serious and vaguely more realistic tone, but it is still boys in macho hell on steroids. Despite a different cast, the story picks up where the last left off. A new crop has entered the school and the hierarchy for alpha male is soon at stake. Gora (Yuya Yagira) seems to have the ass-kicker position in his control with Takagi (Kenzo) close behind. The younger Kagami (Taichi Saotome), with gang connections, is the wildcard while loner Kaburagi (Masahiro Higashide) is also drawn into the fray. One would like to think this kind of film carries on the tradition of Nagisa Oshima’s masterpiece Seishun Zankoku Monogatari (Cruel Stories of Youth, 1960), but in reality there is little common ground between that insightful psychological investigation and this mindless face punching. (129 min.)