Highly recommended: Baby Assassins, a hilarious Japanese comedy-thriller about two mismatched women forced to be roommates but find being contract killers harder than living together.
You might wonder if we need any more contract killer movies. However, Baby Assassins is a welcome new entry, a comedy about two 20-year-old women who enter the lucrative world of assassinations but are forced to be roommates. It’s like Ghost World if the two girls were contract killers.
Saori Izawa is an MMA fighter and stunt performer who has been in several major movies. Akari Takaishi is an accomplished stage actress with a rising career in film and television. Izawa plays the taciturn, antisocial Mahiro as barely functional in society while Takaishi plays the chirpy, chipper Chisato, who seems to fit in better until she cracks and goes full psychopath. These baby assassins make the funniest double act on screen for ages as they deal with trying to be adults in a contemporary Tokyo, living in a cramped apartment together with very little in common. They’re lazy, bored, and jaded as they reluctantly try to stick to the rules of their management company and find crappy part-time jobs as part of their cover. Cue satirical commentary about the gig economy and contemporary Tokyo life. Their jobs put them in the sights of a Yakuza and his overly enthusiastic daughter, whose enjoyment of the criminal life mirrors Chisato’s own goofy glee.
When Baby Assassins Hang Out
Baby Assassins is what Quentin Tarantino calls a “hangout movie,” where the real appeal is watching fun, likable characters hang out with each other. Izawa and Takaishi spend as much of the movie just getting up to quick hijinks with each other in what look like semi-improvised comedy setpieces, whether it’s arguing over who should kill a target, eating too noisily at home and annoying each other or asking to borrow a gun like they’re borrowing a shirt, the most seemingly mundane activity is reconfigured into a surreal and hilarious moment by the fact that they’re contract killers. The world created in the movie is an off-kilter world, just a step askew from ours. Even the brutal Yakuza boss tries hard to be a cool dad to his lunkhead son, who just wants to be a stereotypical gangster, and his slightly more savvy daughter as he teaches her the ropes and declares the Yakuza needs to create a better environment for women to work in.
When the action erupts, Baby Assassins delivers with a climax that pulls everything together in a rousing, elaborately choreographed shooting and fight, the latter highlighting Izawa’s skills as a fighter and stunt performer that could be a classic in modern martial arts cinema. But what makes it all matter is the chemistry between Izawa and Takaishi that makes them fun to watch and hang out with, reluctantly trying to adult when they’d rather just spend time watching viral videos on their phones and getting paid for shooting bad people, not having to put up with crappy jobs or, well, dealing with society in general.
Baby Assassins was a hit in Japan, and a sequel, Baby Assassins 2, opened in Japan recently. Hopefully, that will make it here, too, because audiences feel like these two women who are just like us.
Baby Assassins is streaming on Prime, VOD and is available on physical media now. WellGo USA continues to bring us great genre movies from Asia.
Baby Assassins
Review by Adi Tantimedh
8/10
A hilarious comedy-thriller about two twentysomething women who have to room together while navigating life as contract killers but finding being roommates the harder part, a worthy new take on the assassins genre with a winning double act in a deadpan and surreal satire about modern life and living in the gig economy.
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