I wrote previously about the DVDs-and-booze Alamo Drafthouse at home program that the Austin-based movie tavern dynasty has rolled out as part of their COVID business model. I wasn’t terribly impressed with The FP, but the second selection, I Declare War, really hit for me.

I Declare War is the story of two factions of children playing war, with shockingly high stakes and consequences that will echo far beyond this one hot afternoon. On one side, there’s longstanding champion P.K. (Gage Munroe) and his crew: P.K.’s best friend Paul (Siam Yu), hothead rule challenger Kenney (Eric Hanson), enigmatic scout Caleb (Kolton Steward), timid altar boy Wesley (Andy Reid), and brash loudmouth Joker (Spencer Howes), who has a tendency to be a little bit of a bully. On the other side is Quinn (Aidan Gouveia), the first kid that P.K. thinks has the tactical knowledge to beat him, and Quinn’s team: anger-management-challenged and budding sociopath Skinner (Michael Friend), diminutive chatterbox Frost (Alex Cardillo), thuggish but dim-witted Sikorski (Dyson Fyke), and Jessica (Mackenzie Munroe), the only girl playing the game, who’s only there because of her crush on Quinn. The game will end when the general of one team captures the opponent’s flag.

We’re introduced to the rules—both those of the game itself and the rules of the visual language of the war itself—immediately. Each child has a firearm, and after we first see it established that these weapons are actually made of sticks, tin cans, and other assorted debris, we then see them as the children see them: Jessica’s slingshot is a crossbow, P.K. carries a pistol that looks far too large for his little hands, and Frost and several others carry automatics. The rules are as follows: if you’re hit, you’re paralyzed for ten speedboats (“one speedboat, two speedboat, three speedboat …”), giving your opponent time to move in and perform the finishing/killing move with a grenade (a balloon filled with red liquid). After you’ve counted to ten, you’re able to escape. Generals can’t move their bases after the game has started, and when you’re out, you go home. The war is over when a general captures the opponent’s flag.

We get a lot of detail about the characters that we’ll be following from pretty early on, as the cast drops to a more manageable number pretty quickly, when a fully committed Kenney, complete with ‘Nam-esque camo paint, takes out one of Quinn’s men before “dying” himself. Skinner instructs Sikorski to kick Kenney around in the dirt for information about P.K.’s base, which is cheating (the dead can’t be interrogated), establishing Skinner as a bully and a cheat. Kenney likewise wants to stick around and assist P.K., but the latter insists that the rules be followed, establishing P.K. as committed to honoring the rules of engagement and to his successful victory at any cost within those parameters, although he does attempt some subterfuge of his own later on. P.K.’s own establishing character moment comes when he and Paul talk about what they’re doing after the battle: pizza and a movie at P.K.’s. Paul asks what movie, to which P.K. replies that they’ll be watching Patton, to Paul’s chagrin, as this is explicitly not for the first time P.K. has subjected him to this particular film. Wesley takes up a role as the platoon’s chaplain by default, serving as the coward who’s too afraid to stand up for himself or even shoot his “gun,” initially finding himself in conflict with Joker, whose shtick is outlandish hypothetical situations and calling Christian concepts of God’s love “gay.” One such hypothetical shows P.K. thinking outside the box to create his own resolution that gives him the best of both situations, to which Joker objects, showing us early on that P.K. doesn’t see himself as bound within the binary between options A and B, but as entitled to “winning” in every situation.

Paul is our real lead here, however, as we see much of the conflict between P.K. and Skinner (who deposes Quinn in a coup early on) through his eyes. When Paul is cornered, Skinner takes him prisoner instead of grenading him outright, under the assumption that P.K. will personally come and rescue Paul, leaving their base unguarded and enabling Skinner to steal their flag. Skinner goes into full-on Lord of the Flies mode pretty much immediately, issuing contradictory orders to Frost, Sikorski, and Jessica and quickly realizing that knocking Quinn off so soon has left them undermanned. What he really wants, however, is for the others to leave him alone with the bound Paul so he can torture the smaller boy. And not play-torture, either; as soon as they’re alone, he threatens Paul with a knife and lays a section of plywood across Paul’s prone body and starts piling rocks and cement blocks on him, calling Paul racial slurs and telling him that this was how people were put to death before hanging became the standard form of execution. It’s troubling and dark, and only slightly marred by some of the more over-the-top deliveries from the young actors (these are all extremely solid performances for child actors–shockingly so, so I’m more inclined to forgive the moments when their reach exceeds their grasp).

We learn that, before Paul and his family moved to the community, P.K. and Skinner were best friends, but that P.K. ultimately rejected him because of his issues with anger management. We also learn that Skinner is bullied at school, including a prank enacted upon him by two girl classmates who invited him to go swimming and gave him a fake address, and he also blames some of his social isolation on no longer being friends with P.K., although it’s unclear how much of this is true or is simply part of Skinner’s obsession with P.K. in general and retaking what he perceives as his rightful place next to P.K. that Paul has “usurped” from him. Paul, however, ultimately learns that P.K.’s friendship may not be all that it’s cracked up to be; it’s not just endless viewings of Patton (although that would be enough to stretch any friendship to a near-breaking point), but carelessness about their relationship. Even after Paul escapes from literal physical torture at Skinner’s hands, P.K. sends him back to be recaptured intentionally so that he can proceed with his current plan to take Skinner’s flag. When Skinner is willing to concede defeat if P.K. simply cuts Paul with the knife from earlier, it’s left ambiguous whether P.K. was willing to do so in the name of winning or not.

There’s a lot going on in the margins here: Frost and Sikorski as the Rosencrantz and Gildenstern of this private little war, Joker’s intermittent fantasies about being able to blow away annoyances with laser eyes, and Caleb using the R/C airplane that Quinn had left behind to deal a climactic blow. I’m not sure how I feel about Jessica doing her own thing and imagining fantasy conversations with Quinn, however. There’s value in noting that her internal life and how she perceives the activities of the day is different from the boys, but there’s something just a little bit… off about her characterization. At one point, Skinner suggests she use her feminine wiles to distract the enemy, and she is rightfully put out by the ignorance of this, but by reducing the number of girl characters to one and having her participation be solely for the purpose of impressing the boy on whom she has a crush, the script makes the same reductive mistake that Skinner does, in a way.

As the movie goes on, each character becomes more and more filthy and disheveled, their faces first getting dirty and then transforming into a kind of warpaint. There’s also something beautifully upsetting about the validity of Skinner’s frustration; his issues could easily stem from an undiagnosed neurodivergence or potentially treatable personality disorder, but his peers see him as simply “a spaz” and ostracize him, leading him to engage in behavior that’s not terribly dissimilar from P.K.’s own in its casual disregard for conventions of friendship but more openly antagonistic. At the film’s end, we’re left wondering if this has ended Paul and P.K.’s friendship as well, or if they can repair what P.K. and Skinner clearly cannot.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond