Baby Assassins: Nice Days (2024)

Original title: Baby Walkure: Naisu Deizu

Everybody’s favourite teen assassins Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa) go on a work trip in Miyazaki for this outing. It looks like a bit of a walk in the park for our favourite murderous friends, so the girls treat the escapade as a holiday with occasional murder for money.

Alas, they are not the only ones trying to assassinate this particular target. Mightily disturbed independent contract killer Fuyumura (Sosuke Ikematsu) is not only onto the same target as the two, he is very concerned with this kill being his body count anniversary. Consequently, he reacts very badly indeed to our heroines’ attempt at stealing “his” kill. The prospective victim, of course, uses the conflict between his would-be assassins as an opportunity to escape.

The assassin’s guild don’t tolerate this sort of thing, so they team Mahiro and Chisato with a very rude local co-worker and her not terribly bright bodybuilding partner to fix the situation, kill Fuyumura and then the target. The problem is that Fuyumura is so dangerous, even four assassins might not be enough to beat him.

In between murder and carnage, there are of course the expected scenes of bickering, female friendship of the kind that basically writes its Lesbian fanfic itself, and absurdity, all presented in the Japanese style.

Apparently, writer/director Yugo Sakamoto had a bit more of a budget to work with for the third Baby Assassins film, so there are more action sequences and a bit less comedy in this entry into the series.

Fortunately, this is a case of a careful escalation of scope of the action and of more conciseness in the comedy rather than an awkward attempt at making things more mainstream or cleaning them up too much. It’s simply more joy on both sides of the Baby Assassins equation.

It does help that the comedy still is often very funny indeed – if you like your humour deadpan and Japanese – and becomes part of the emotional language of friendship between our protagonists in the film, as it sometimes does in real life between friends.

The action for its part is even better choreographed than in the earlier movies. Izawa’s speed is still the film’s not so secret weapon there, but Takaishi has stepped up nicely as an action actress, and there’s a greater ambition and sense of scale in the choreography.

Pleasantly, even the fights Mahiro and Chisato aren’t involved in don’t feel like filler, but rather like generous additions to the whole affair’s variety.

So generosity seems to be the third Baby Assassins' watchword, which I generously accept in the spirit it is offered.

Baby Assassins (2021)

Original title: Beibî warukyûre

Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa) are two highly trained assassins working as partners for one of those assassin organizations the movies love so well. They also just graduated high school. Their organization makes it a point to give their assassins a surface cover of normality, so the two girls are ordered to move in together. Each of them is to take on some kind of shitty side job as a cover as well.

These leads to two problems. Firstly, even though Mahiro and Chisato work very well together, they are less than perfect roommates. Chisato is girly, personable and traditionally pretty where Mahiro wears her natural weirdness on an outside of astonishing social awkwardness; which makes for a bit of a strained living situation. Secondly, MacJobs are horrible, and finding and keeping one is going to be a problem for these two, particularly for Mahiro.

Because looking for part time jobs does not for a proper action comedy make – unless Mahiro fantasizes elaborately about killing her interviewers, as is her understandable wont – there’s also a bit of trouble with a group of yakuza. Particularly the daughter of a mid-level boss is going to turn into a bit of a nemesis for Chisato. On the plus side, these are the sort of troubles lasting friendships are built on.

I wouldn’t have believed it, but Yugo Sakamoto’s mix of Japanese slacker comedy and assassin buddy action comedy is an utterly fantastic piece of work that makes its genre mix work by the simple but difficult to achieve virtue of being good at all the genres it is made of.

The slacker comedy is relatable to anyone who ever had to suffer through job interviews, bad working conditions and insane work, and is certainly made even funnier by the loving depiction of the weird and deeply localized version of crap work the film chooses to inflict on its characters. In particular, there’s a longer sequence of scenes about a maid café that’s funny by virtue of being only lightly exaggerated. Here, the film also demonstrates some of its quieter virtues by putting some actual humanity into the most grotesque situations, which makes it curiously lacking in cynicism for a film about two ruthless professional killers. Of course, the maid café is also the point where the girls’ real jobs and their unloved fake jobs will collide, because Sakamoto’s script is often genuinely clever in working with these kinds of contrasts – for the jokes and for the serious moments.

As an action film, this has that most curious of things – heavily MMA influenced action I find actually fun to look at; it certainly helps that Izawa – who is thirty, so not at all just out of high school – is an experienced stunt performer and screen fighter and sells complex and very technical moves with verve and a kind of manic energy that’s impossible not to admire the hell out of. The climactic fight – that also gives Takaishi plenty of opportunity to shine - is particularly great in this regard. It is also, as is much of the film, inventive and creative in its loving play with clichés and tropes.

Lastly, as a buddy movie, this very simply thrives on the fun chemistry between the two lead actresses, as well as the simple fact that Baby Assassins’ jokes tend to be genuinely funny.