10 Great Horror Movie Characters Ruined By Terrible Sequels
2. Battle Royale II: Requiem - Shuya
In the brilliant Battle Royale, Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara) is a down-to-earth everyman, the kind of blank-slate audience surrogate great for this kind of outlandish story. He's likeable, he's empathetic and viewers will be glad that he survived. In this movie, he's last seen fleeing from the authorities alongside fellow survivor Noriko (Aki Maeda) and it'd be pretend his story ended there.
In Battle Royale II: Requiem, the appalling sequel released in 2003, Noriko largely escaped unscathed as she only appears very briefly. Shuya, on the other hand, takes a central role. He's now an Osama Bin Laden-esque terrorist waging war on the Japanese government. Yes, that's actually what happens.
Turning a peaceful, decent kid into a violent mass murderer was bad enough on its own, but making him the leader of a clear Al-Qaeda stand-in group took this to the next level. The movie portrays Shuya is a sympathetic antihero even though he's established as having killed thousands upon thousands of innocent people in an attack that's a transparent allusion to 9/11. What the hell is this?
As well as being a bad sequel, Battle Royale II is also one of the most offensive films ever produced, the kind of thing so morally repugnant one wishes it didn't exist.