It is set three years after the events of the previous film and follows Shuya Nanahara, who has now become an international terrorist intending to bring down the Japanese totalitarian government.

Director Kinji Fukasaku, who helmed the first film, started production but died of prostate cancer on January 12, 2003, after shooting only one scene with Beat Takeshi.

[5] Three years after the events of the first film, the survivors of previous Battles Royale have formed a rebel group called the Wild Seven, led by Shuya Nanahara.

A class of ninth graders, composed of "a ragtag collection of delinquents and losers", are tricked into going onto a "field trip" and then kidnapped by the authoritarian Japanese government.

After their school bus is diverted to an army base, the students are herded into a cage, surrounded by armed guards, and confronted by their schoolteacher, Riki Takeuchi, who lays down the ground rules of the new Battle Royale game.

Most of the students are not interested in being forced to avenge their families, but they are coerced to fight through exploding metal collars, which their captors can detonate by remote control.

Two of the survivors are a delinquent, Takuma Aoi; and Shiori Kitano, the daughter of the "teacher" of a Battle Royale program who was killed by Shuya three years previously.

Under pressure from the U.S. government, the Japanese prime minister takes command of the military present at the Battle Royale headquarters and orders an attack on the Wild Seven's base, with no survivors allowed – if they fail, the U.S. will bomb the island.

The survivors of the base (including the surviving students, except Shiori) retreat to the mainland via a mine shaft while the war between the Wild Seven and the military occurs.

Fukasaku intended to provide an alternative to what Time magazine's Ilya Garger describes as "the moral certainty of American culture" as seen in U.S. films and foreign policy.

Many of the reviewers criticized the film for being inferior to the original, having a contrived, confusing plot line, its controversial, provocative sentiments, and generally bad acting.

[6] One of the few positive reviews was from Jamie Russell of BBC who stated that the film "scrapes by on the strength of its startlingly subversive political commentary," wearing "its anti-American sentiments on its sleeve."

Despite criticizing it for being "torturously overlong, resoundingly clunky and full of a bloated sense of its own importance," it concluded that "its decision to cast its heroes as teenage Al Qaeda-style terrorists fighting against a fascistic adult America is staggeringly bold.