Three years ago, 70-year old veteran filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku unleashed one of the few bona fide cult classics of this fledgling century, when most of his peers were desperately trying not to shit themselves whilst trying to remember what they had for breakfast that morning. In a world fractured by the sounds of gunfire echoing through the halls of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and a nation cowering in fear at the violent brutality being meted out by its children, Fukasaku had fashioned a timely and terrifying satire on the way a troubled society raises its youth, the demise of family values, and reality TV. It was a shocking wake-up call for Japan, and a reflection of Fukasaku’s anxiety about the treatment of his country’s children. And there was loads of cool and unusual bloodshed, too. Battle Royale was a perfect, self-contained movie.

So, of course, a sequel was inevitable. Trailing a slew of bad reviews from its Japanese release in its wake, Battle Royale II: Requiem has a lot to live up to. Or a lot to live down, depending on how you look at it. Fukasaku died shortly after embarking on his follow-up, passing on the directorial reins to his son Kenta. And the lack of clarity or any kind of narrative cohesion shows his inexperience behind the camera.

Deliberately mirroring our post 9-11 world, the film begins with a terrorist attack on Japan, with two towers razed to rubble in the orange glow of sunrise. Blamed for the attack is a terrorist cell known as Wild Seven, consisting of all the survivors from the previous Battle Royale games, and led by the first movie’s hero, Shuya Nanahara, deliberately fashioned into a fictional analogue of Osama Bin Laden.

Soon after, it’s time for another round of the Program, the game in which a class of teenagers are kitted out with high-tech weaponry, dumped in a remote location, and told to wipe each other out until the last man’s standing. The exploding necklaces that detonate at the end of three days ensure that they don’t spend too long deliberating on the morality of it all. The difference this time is that the necklaces are in pairs. If one contestant dies, their partner’s collar will detonate. Clearly, the first Battle Royale was for pussies.

One more twist: the students are being sent to wipe out Wild Seven. School uniform chic is out, and army fatigues are in, leading to a beachfront siege that makes Saving Private Ryan look like Small Soldiers, and explosive carnage porn replete with a satisfying number of arterial money shots.

An hour into the film, though, it becomes pretty apparent that the Battle Royale elements of the film are mere window-dressing for a well intentioned, but ham-fisted, diatribe against aggressive foreign policy and the insanity of escalating retaliatory violence, with the terrorists resorting to methods just as reprehensible as those of the government attempting to repress them. Where the first film took aim at its targets with calculated precision, BRII is messy, confused and brutal, arguably more apt in these War on Terror days where it’s difficult to tell the good guys from the bad.

An ambitious failure then, with its heart in the right spot, it’s thinking all over the place, and its entrails splattered all over the screen. But it’s still more worthy of your time than most of the hackneyed Hollywood spectacle that has been foisted upon us this summer.