Kids Return

1996 [JAPANESE]

Action / Crime / Drama / Sport

22
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 89% · 5 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 89% · 5K ratings
IMDb Rating 7.4/10 10 7259 7.3K

high school japan yakuza bullying flashback boxing

Plot summary

Shinji and Masaru spend most of their school days harassing fellow classmates and playing pranks. They drop out and Shinji becomes a small-time boxer, while Masaru joins up with a local yakuza gang. However, the world is a tough place.

Director

Takeshi Kitano Photo
Takeshi Kitano

Top cast

Mineo Sugiura Photo
Mineo Sugiura
Kyôsuke Yabe Photo
Kyôsuke Yabe as Delinquent group
Hatsuo Yamaya Photo
Hatsuo Yamaya as Boxing Club Manager
Yûko Daike Photo
Yûko Daike as Sachiko
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
991.76 MB
1280*682
Japanese 2.0
NR
Subtitles jp  
23.976 fps
1 hr 47 min
Seeds 5
1.8 GB
1920*1024
Japanese 2.0
NR
Subtitles jp  
23.976 fps
1 hr 47 min
Seeds 24

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by howard.schumann 7 / 10

Boys will be boys

In Takeshi Kitano's 1996 semi-autobiographical film Kids Return, his first since a motorcycle accident (suicide attempt) in 1995 left him close to death, the Japanese education system comes in for a thrashing. Masaru (Kenichi Kaneko) and his buddy, Shinji (Masanobu Ando) know how to have a good time. Not to be bothered with such fruitless endeavors like going to school and learning something useful, they would rather clown around, harass teachers, bully younger students and shake them down for money, sneak into porn theatres, perform stand-up comedy (manzai) routines, or set fire to a teacher's brand new car - just good, clean fun.As they say in the vernacular "what goes around comes around" and the coming around this time is in the form of a friend of one of the bullied students who unfortunately for the boys is a skilled street fighter. Their encounter turns their attention to a boxing gym where they give up on school and train for revenge against the oppressor. Unfortunately, Shinji is the only one who shows any talent for boxing and he begins to climb in the estimation of "The President." Masura, on the other hand, gives up and joins a menacing yazuka gang. Shinji passively follows an older, cynical boxer who teaches him some illegal tricks to succeed in the ring as well as some strange ways to lose weight.Things work well for a time until both of the lads crash and burn and realize how much better it is just to hang out and be happy than actually do something constructive. Meanwhile, a gentle boy named Reiko (Atsuki Ueda), marries his perennial sweetheart Sachiko (Yuko Daike) but decides to pass on college. He gets a job in a corporation which doesn't work out and he is soon eking out a living as a taxi driver, a depressing sequence which seems to be in the film for no reason other than to show us how the education system failed again.Kids Return is a very well done film with some excellent boxing scenes and a few good laughs, but there does not seem to be any lessons learned here. While we have to cut Shinji and Masura some slack because, after all, they are just kids and they may be a tongue-in-cheek stand-in for Kitano's own adolescence, what Kids Return is trying to say with all of this is a head-scratcher – maybe it's just that boys will be boys.
Reviewed by MOscarbradley 8 / 10

As good as anything Kitano has done

Life's hard for a couple of juvenile delinquents in Japan. Takeshi Kitano's marvelous 1996 film "Kids Return" skirts around the fringes of his better known gangster pictures to look at the seeds that, once planted, might turn a boy into a gangster or, as happens here with one of our anti-heroes, a boxer. This is a very likable, small-scale film full of all the affection of friendship where even violence seems like a necessary evil in the process of growing up. Drawing superb performances from his young cast Kitano, who wrote, directed and edited the picture, keeps things light and easy with just the right degrees of sadness and humour. This may not be one of his better known films but it's just as good as anything he's done.
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