I think this is about the fourth movie in this series, unless the High & Low from 1963 with Toshiro Mifune is supposed to be part of it as well. It's definitely clear a bunch of these characters know each other and have backstory, but the movie only vaguely alludes to it. I guess because they assume you've watched the earlier films.
All you really need to know is it's one of those set-ups with the massive high school gangs where everyone looks like they belong in a boy band, that occasionally get together and beat the crap out of each other. If there's a main character, it may be Fujio, who has returned to his old neighborhood to attend Oya High. There's some set-up about full-time and part-time students that I don't get (one character refers to the part-timers as 'reserve yakuzas', and I don't know if that means they're literal mobsters or what), and Fujio wants to be top dog among the full-timers.
Fujio's kind of a Goku type, in that he's extremely good about getting people to like and respect him, and he's always easily excited about stuff. After he loses a fight to the leader of a different gang, he's told the guy who beat him lost to the leader of another gang, and he's determined to go find that guy and fight him.
Then his school gets roped into a war against some other, more powerful gang from another school. Because both the gangs are trying to keep a drug called redrum out, and the dealers obviously don't like that. Then both schools' gangs team up to assault the housing complex where the dealers are set up, and there's a huge brawl against a bunch of drugged out lunatics.
On top of that, there's a subplot about Masayuma, the leader of Oya High's part-time students (who are apparently higher in the pecking order than the full-timers) trying to decide what he's going to do with his life and move on. One of the funnier bits is when he seems really angry about something, then announces he lost his job. Everyone exclaims "Again?", and he falls to his knees bemoaning how he's going to starve.
I guess that's how the series works. Certain characters eventually age out, but you have other characters get older and rise in the ranks. I couldn't tell you whether I actually like the movie or not. Maybe if I'd seen the others, and the shared history meant more. Also, it felt like the movie kept adding more stuff to it, like mentioning other schools or people I'd not seen or heard of yet. At a certain point, enough, just go with what you've got.
The fights aren't bad, there are some decent moves and choreography in there with characters vaulting off each other, or using ladders as barricades or slingshots. But these kids really like doing the Superman punch move. Freaking everyone does it at some point or another. But all the fights start with two group facing off at the end of an open area, then sprinting towards each other screaming, so I guess you might as well go big.
3 comments:
I was going to say that I've never heard of this but I have seen -- and enjoyed -- the Crows Zero series which seems to be the same sort of premise.
Then I looked into it and High & Low seems to be a sprawling media franchise, part of which is this film, a crossover with The Worst, which itself is a spinoff of Crows, so there's that.
So it's its own fictional universe, doing a crossover with another fictional universe? Yikes.
Yup, as far as I can tell there are four High & Low TV series and six (!) films, plus various other bits and pieces.
Crows and Worst are a completely different franchise, both set in the same school as each other, telling different stories but with some crossover characters.
What's weirdest about this whole thing is that while Crows was adapted into a series of films, Worst was not, and yet it's Worst that crosses over with High & Low.
I think my brain juts broke.
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