Playing ‘war' was, during this writer's childhood at least, a pretty common past time. On any given Sunday afternoon it wasn't in the least bit uncommon to see many of the neighborhood kids, boys and girls alike, running around in the woods between our suburb and the train tracks blasting away at one another with toy guns and imaginary bullets. It's probably a pretty safe assumption that this happened in many neighborhoods around the continent, if not around the world. It was fun. No one got hurt, unless someone tripped and scraped their knee or ran too fast under a low laying branch, and when it was all over and done with whatever sides were taken quickly dissolved in the name of friendship and the general pursuit of childhood happiness. Written by Jason Lapeyre and co-directed by Lapeyre and Robert Wilson, 2012's I Declare War takes that basic and common childhood past time to some interesting and decidedly adult extremes.

The premise is simple enough: a group of twelve year old boys and one lone girl, Jess (Mackenzie Munro), leave the safety of their suburban backyards to a woodlot very much like the one most everyone else played in. Here they pick teams and set out to play a game of capture the flag. As they establish their rules and teams and boundaries and set about their play, fantasy starts to blend with reality. The imaginary guns made from sticks or toys that they pretend to shoot their opponents with start to look like real metal firearms and the water balloons that they filled up explode in bloody pops. As the game gets underway, P.K. (Gage Munroe) and his team do their best to outsmart Skinner (Michael Friend) and his team so that they can free their comrade Kwon (Siam Yu) who is being tortured in Skinner's prison camp.

Of course, the game intensifies and as it does, friendships that were previously rock solid soon show signs of stress until eventually, all in the name of winning, the rules of the game are bent and the lines that separate fantasy and reality begin to fray…

What's interesting about this movie is how it does just that, how it shows the reality we know to be ‘true' blend with the imagined actions that the kids take against one another and the increasingly brutal results of that action. It's a bit shocking in the sense that when we see all of this in its ‘imagined' state we are witnessing some pretty harsh ‘kid on kid' violence as the kids shoot one another throughout the movie and blow each other up with their grenades. The movie makes a strong but not at all inaccurate statement about how seriously kids can and do take competitive play, be it the bloody results of capture the flag as shown here or a fight that might erupt over a heated Wii session (many of us have seen this happen). We see the war that the kids indulge in played out in much the same way we might see it happen in a movie like Platoon in that it's gritty, violent, bloody and laced with profanity and just like in that movie and others we see the effects of what the combatants are put through affect the personalities of those involved.

At the same time, we get this odd child-like take on the true motivations behind all of this. Why is Skinner so intent on keeping Kwon? Because he desperately wants to rekindle the friendship that he lost with Kwan and this is a way that he can communicate that without wimping out about his emotions in front of his friends. So we wind up with interesting contrasts here, we get some pretty realistic violence and the type of language that would accompany that often times as a metaphor for the way in which these kids are trying to resolve some personal issues amongst their group peppered with childlike exaggerations and unrealistic ideas (at one point a kid decides he can shoot laser beams out of his eyes to roast his foes!).

The picture doesn't hold back, making it a film better suited for those older than the kids cast in the film. The commitment that the young actors show here is admirable, everyone stays in character and we have no trouble whatsoever believing that, yeah, these guys are into it in a big way. The themes that work their way into the storyline and the deeper meaning behind some of the words and deeds portrayed, however, are not the stuff of a kid's film. Not to say that younger viewers able to pay attention and pull from what they see here to come away with their own interpretation shouldn't see it but a lot of what Lapeyre and Wilson accomplish with this picture might go over the heads of those who don't necessarily understand why they're seeing what they're seeing. It's a clever film, a very thought provoking picture that is not only well made but quite confrontational. It's a picture that questions why, as both kids and adults, we act the way we do, why we find enjoyment in certain aspects of our culture and why we react to those around us in certain ways. Very much a film worth seeing, I Declare War is an excellent addition to Drafthouse Films' increasingly diverse catalogue, and they've seen fit to roll out the red carpet for it. Which brings us to…

Video:

I Declare War is framed at 2.35.1 widescreen and presented in AVC encoded 1080p high definition. Shot digitally the image is clean and obviously there are no issues with grain or print damage to note. Detail is very strong as is color reproduction, the reds really popping nicely against the green and brown foliage and dirt in the forest where much of the action takes place. Black levels are maybe just a little less than perfect but they're strong while skin looks like skin, no weird waxiness. There is some shimmer in a few scenes but texture is good as is contrast and depth. All in all, this is a strong looking picture.