Six Murderous Movie Minors

In honor of SXSW opener "Kick-Ass," a look at killer kids in movies and the controversy that followed.

Mathilda of “The Professional” (1994)

As any connoisseur of ’90s action cinema knows, there are two versions of Luc Besson’s “The Professional.” The U.S. cut runs 110 minutes and tells the story of a 12-year-old (Natalie Portman) whose family has been murdered and who takes a hitman (Jean Reno) as her tutor. Then there’s the international cut that runs 26 minutes longer and restores some of the sexual tension between the two lonely souls as they seek out the man responsible for murdering her family. Of course, U.S. censors were less concerned with the violence than the relatively innocent come-ons of Portman’s Mathilda (although her parents objected to a scene in an early draft of the script where the assassin Léon would walk in on her taking a shower). Also, according to her parents’ wishes, Portman was limited to smoking just five cigarettes in the film, but that allowed the young actress to concentrate on smoking bad guys, learning how to assemble a rifle and clean the barrel long before she could legally learn to drive. In the film, she takes out a jogger in the park with a paintball under Léon’s watchful eye, drinks plenty of milk and awaits the day she can take vengeance. Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times that “”The Professional” is much too sentimental to sound shockingly amoral in the least,” but the film went on to become beloved enough to rank #34 on IMDb users’ list of favorite films.

Francie Brady of “The Butcher Boy” (1998)

As in “The Professional,” it wasn’t the blood spilled by the 12-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) in Neil Jordan’s kaleidoscopic adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s ‘60s coming-of-age story that stirred up controversy when it was released in 1998. Rather, it was the casting of Sinead O’Connor as the Virgin Mary who appears in Francie’s fantasies that led the Irish Catholic Church to condemn the film. (Its release also unfortunately coincided with the junior high school massacre in Jonesboro, AK, which resulted in outlets such as Newsweek pulling their reviews and a generally underwhelming take at the box office.) Still, the film is one of Jordan’s best, with a startling performance from the red-haired Owens as a charming Irish lad with a psychopathic streak that isn’t helped by an unhealthy homelife with a troubled mother (Aisling O’Sullivan), an alcoholic father (Stephen Rea) and a neighboring family whose preening perfection nags at him.

In addition to his abilities as a deft pickpocket and a ferocious fighter, Francie shows great promise as a pig butcher after getting kicked out of a reformatory. He becomes an apprentice at a slaughterhouse where he’s able to hone his skills, especially in the disposal of carcasses. The work keeps Francie afloat, but makes him an outcast of the community and the end result isn’t pretty when he gets his hands on a nail gun. “The Butcher Boy” never played in more than 90 theaters, earning close to $2 million for Warner Bros., but found a greater appreciation among critics here and abroad — at the Berlin International Film Festival, Jordan and Owens both took home awards.

Shiroiwa Junior High School Class of ’00 in “Battle Royale” (2000)

Though long available at your friendly local all-region DVD store, no U.S. distributor, not even the adventurous ones, ever dared to pick up the rights to Kinji Fukasaku’s Japanese thriller about a junior high field trip that turns into a game of survival of the fittest. Adapted from a 1999 novel by Koushun Takami, the pitch black satire takes place on an island where pimply-faced teens are forced to kill each other until there’s only one survivor in a government-sponsored experiment. (This is what you get when you have the badass Takeshi Kitano for a teacher.)

Beyond having Quentin Tarantino name the film his favorite since 1992 (and casting the mascara-heavy schoolgirl Chiaka Kuriyama in “Kill Bill”), the film grossed a massive $25 million on its home turf as members of the Japanese parliament decried the film’s possible negative influence on Japan’s already rebellious youth as they saw the group of classmates poison, bludgeon and shoot each other. Director Fukusaku didn’t live long enough to see the release of a sequel in 2003 that showed the survivors of the deadly game become a terrorist cell (his son Kenta, who wrote the first film, directed). But he nonetheless fought a valiant battle against the Japanese censorship board for the release of the first film, which resulted in an R15 rating that Fukusaku makes the point of slashing in half during the opening credits.

[Additional photos: "The Bad Seed," Warner Bros., 1956; "The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane," MGM, 1976; "The Good Son," 20th Century Fox, 1993; "The Professional," Columbia Pictures, 1994; "The Butcher Boy," Warner Bros., 1998; "Battle Royale," Toei, 2000]

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