Fights were a spectator sport at my rural Pennsylvania high school. One guy would call out another and after classes the combatants would square off on a patch of ground outside school property, surrounded by a circle of friends and hangers-on. The typical finish was the victor straddling the prostrate loser and pounding him into submission. Not very sophisticated, martial-arts-wise, but this was before Bruce Lee, not to mention Sonny Chiba.
Watching Takeshi Tokairin's "Gekijo-ban Kenka Bancho: Zenkoku Seiha" ("Fighting Gang Bosses: National Champion"), the latest entry in the thriving subgenre of films about battling bad boys, I realized that we lacked more than kung fu skills. We didn't have a bancho, which translates as "juvenile gang boss," but can also mean, as the film shows, the toughest guy in school, the prefecture — or Japan.
Based on a PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable game series, the film is, like many game-to -movie adaptations, light on story, heavy on action. But director Tokairin and scriptwriter Takeshi Miyamoto succeed in transforming at least a few of the game's avatars into recognizable teens (or rather punks), while leavening the endless butt whoopings with gags that range from the silly to the blackly clever.