I Declare War *** (2012, Siam Yu, Kolton Stewart, Gage Munroe) – Movie Review

A group of 12-year-old boys and one girl play out a lively war game of Capture the Flag in the local woods. In best Lord of the Flies fashion, the summer war games turn deadly serious with jealousy and betrayal dangerously blurring the lines between make-believe and reality.

Initially there’s a fixed simple set of rules with paint-filled balloons equalling grenades, trees equalling control towers and sticks equalling sub-machine guns. But somehow you know from the beginning it’s going to end badly.

With no adults in the cast, writer-director Jason Lapeyre makes a good job of this on his low budget, and the child actors all hit the mark. This Canadian film is involving and intriguing, while the script is intelligent and thought-provoking as it tackles its serious themes and issues of friendship, lost innocence and humanity’s dark side. Nothing particularly new emerges, but it’s still engrossing and worthwhile.

It has a 15 certificate, no doubt due to the swearing as much as the violence and weapons on screen, but the film’s actually relevant for all age groups, even properly-supervised kids of the age of the characters in the film. Of course one of the problems of the kids in the film is that they are not properly supervised. It’s one of the messages that emerges, though it’s not the film-maker’s main message, which is less practical than that and more philosophical.

In the cast are Siam Yu, Kolton Stewart, Gage Munroe, Michael Friend, Aidan Gouveia, Mackenzie Munro, Alex Cardillo, Eric Hanson and Alex Wall.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/