Crows 3

I've always loved the Crows, but this third installment lacks that extra something the previous ones had. There’s no bonding, the strength of friendship doesn't come through at all. It's just kind of empty, flat, and superficial. The music is the same as in the previous installments, and it does sound great, but that's the only "great" thing about the film. I'm not going to comment on the acting, which was never the point anyway, but the fights don't seem that cool, or even like they matter. They're just a sort of a means of expressing puberty and coming to terms with the past. Unfortunately, however, the film is so superficial that it doesn't come across as interesting at all. It struck me as a depiction of the sad lives of a few characters, interspersed with high school fights. Not that great. Masahiro may be quite handsome with his broad shoulders, but that doesn't matter in this movie. (30.10.2014)

At first glance, it seemed like an enlightened decision to entrust the directing of the third installment of the Crows franchise, about high-school hooligans, to Toshiaki Toyoda, who wrote and directed the generational cult film Blue Spring, which was also about, among other things, young men competing for the position of leader of a school gang. However, what was merely a framework for symbolist and empathetic storytelling about the anxiety of growing up in Toyoda’s older film, is the be-all and end-all in Crows. Toyoda’s involvement is rather a total denial of his creative style, nothing of which remains here (though the slow-motion shots remain, but instead of being a dramatic storytelling element, they are used only as a flashy formalistic device). Crows Explode tries to make the individual characters a bit more three-dimensional by emphasising their motivations and it even contains some of the same narrative motifs as Blue Spring, but we’ve already seen those in the first film of the franchise, Crows Zero, directed by Takashi Miike (who, after all, had previously made The Way to Fight, a much more complex variation on fight movies). In the end, however, these tendencies comprise a mere empty embellishment of a film in which everything revolves only around brawling. Because of this, the paradoxically most interesting element of this instalment, and of the franchise as a whole, remains the fact that, even though everyone here pretends to be a big rebel, Crows is essentially an absurdly conformist work in which the tough guys are subject to basically the same social pressures to perform, to devote themselves to the “enterprise” and to make the maximum commitment as students at elite schools and employees of major corporations. Another unintentionally ridiculous feature of the live-action films in the Crows franchise is the fact that the tough guys at the upper levels of the hierarchical pyramid of high-school hooligans are played by actors around the age of thirty, so the whole franchise actually glorifies repeaters. (27.02.2014)