Review of Crows Zero

Just absolute madness. Not madness in the Gozu/Visitor Q sense, but madness in how invested Miike is in the story. Essentially the plot is about a bunch of school-kids who want to ‘take over’ their school. The way they take over the school is by instigating massive brawls in the classrooms and playgrounds and gyms. What makes the film work is that Miike treats this like it is ultimate, serious business, with alliances and broken truces, deceptions and ever escalating stakes. It’s essentially a gangster movie set against the backdrop of a school and it’s never anything less than entertaining for the duration of its runtime.

Helping things out are some fantastically nasty looking fight sequences which are all heightened but have an amazing grounded feel to them. This is the sort of film where high-school kids can spin kick and drop kick each other with insane ease, and it’s full of really painful looking beat downs. Lots of broken bones and blood splatter in this. There are also some great moments of Miike lunacy, including bowling with human beings and a running joke about one of the kids getting darts and baseballs smashed into his head. A parallel story involving actual Yakuza interest in the school is perhaps one of the few things that doesn’t work, but leads into the absolutely nutty final brawl. The final sequence is essentially about 170 kids kicking the shit out of each other in the rain and it works stupendously, even when cross-cutting between the fight scene and a weird J-Pop ballad.