For those who did not yet know it: Kids Return is not the sequel to Larry Clark's notorious study of adolescents. The kids from the title are two Japanese boys who return at the start of the film just one more time to the secondary school where they were both regarded as hopeless failures. But the title also refers to the devastating return punch that one of the boys has. Shinji and Masaru have frittered away most of their youth. Like a Japanese Beavis and Butthead, they are the terror of their secondary school, where they extort fellow pupils and set fire to teacher's brand-new car. When Masaru is on the receiving end of a beating for a change, he decides to take boxing lessons and of course his sidekick Shinji tags along to the sports school. Here he finds his true vocation. Intensive training gives him a belly like sheet steel, a head made of concrete and a return that's enough to startle and stun many an opponent. A natural, his trainer thinks, with great potential. Masaru has already dropped out to join the ranks of the local Yakuza with which he has flirted for so long.

With Kids Return, cult director Kitano Takeshi shows his least predictable side. At first the maker of A Scene at the Sea and Sonatine seems to have had a teenage comedy in mind. The first half hour of Kids Return is fairly farcical, with funny moments (a doll with an enormous erection is hung in front of a classroom window) alongside bland (the duo's attempts to enter a sex cinema). As soon as the two have found their respective vocations, Takeshi tightens the leash and Kids Return takes a very dramatic turn.

Just as in Tokyo Fist, boxing turns out to be favourite pastime for many Japanese men, but there the comparison ends. Where Tokyo Fist shows the purely physical aspects of the noble art of boxing, Takashi takes a mush deeper look at what makes a good boxer. Shinji has two coaches, the boss of the boxing school who wants to make him a fair fighter, and a boxer on the decline who shows him how to floor your opponent with less noble tricks, such as an elbow. It is choices like this that Takeshi allows his two heroes and their contemporaries to make throughout the film. The fact that only few see their dreams come true shows that Takeshi has few illusions about how most human lives turn out. MvdT

Kids Return - Monday 3-2, 10.15 PM, Pathe 1