Final Rating: 4/5
With the release of John Wick back in 2014, there has been an interest in building worlds around the mysterious lives of hired killers. The concept that these people may have outside lives, families, friends, interests and internal work politics intrigues viewers. Baby Assassins looks at what life would be like for underage people who are paid to kill people. There have been movies that explore this theme like Hanna, Leon: The Professional, Black Widow and others, but Baby Assassins changes the format up. Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa) are recent high school graduates who are fantastic contract killers, but in order to blend in with society their agency tells them they must have part time jobs and to live together, to give the appearance of two regular young adults trying to make it in the real world.
The film opens on Mahiro going through an all too familiar experience for young people. Having a job interview with a person who expects them to believe that working in a convenience store is life’s greatest peak. The middle aged manager espouses bad life affirmations and wants utter dedication from his employees. Mahiro can barely stay focused because it is such a foriegn concept to some people that sometimes you just need a job to pay the bills. Then she snaps, she can’t take it anymore and pulls out a gun and admits she doesn’t care about the job interview but instead is there on a job. She shoots the man and tries to leave the store quietly before all the other workers realize what happened and a battle royale starts as every capitalist’s fantasy occurs. The low level employees are willing to fight to the death for the great job creator. What follows is a brutal action sequence, Mahiro swoops and dives around her attackers, disarming them of their knives and using them against them, stabbing them repeatedly. One by one she takes out the larger men using her agility and guile against the brutes. We eventually learn it is a daydream sequence and Mahiro is still stuck in the boring job interview, but it shows us her capabilities, ones we learn aren’t in her head but real skills.
We get meetings with the girls’ agency who do routine check-ins, seeing how their hunt for side jobs goes, how living together works and more. It is a decidedly lower key and more monotonous look into the lives of professional killers, but it creates a nice juxtaposition of the brutality of their real life and the bureaucracy of the behind the scenes nature of it all. Neither girl wants to get a part time job, but Chisato enjoys the social aspect of connecting with other young women her age, compared to Mahiro who would rather spend all day laying on the couch until she needs to kill someone.
The plot converges when the girls kill someone who later is revealed to be involved with the Yakuza, and the gangsters are not happy to lose one of their own. The leader of the Yakuza, played by Masanori Mimoto, is not a sane, rational man, but is impulsive and abusive and leaves a trail of blood wherever he goes. He gets his daughter, who appears just as violent as him but with more charm is tasked with figuring out who killed their associate. From there we get a cat and mouse game of two young women going about their monotonous lives with another young woman hunting them down. It all eventually concludes with a big action set piece with Chasito showing off her impressive shooting skills and Mahiro getting in a brutal hand to hand combat fight.
The film has plenty of humour, mostly centered around young people entering the workforce. Chasito struggles to make perfect dessert waffles at a cafe, while Mahiro fights against the very idea of working. Through character development we see that one girl wants to be socially accepted and tries her best to fit in with “regular” people, while the other can’t be bothered with it. For people that have been fans of the recent trend of action movies actually showing the action like John Wick, Atomic Blonde and Extraction, then this will be right up the viewers alley. The bold colour palette and dizzying camera movements add a fresh and fun layer to the slacker teen genre.
Chisato, played by Akari Takaishi is the standout, her bubbly personality and infectious giggle make her impossible not to love. When she gets hired at a restaurant that at best would be described as a waifu cafe, where the attractive young girls put on childish airs to please their male clientele you worry about where the film is going, but it eventually features some great character development as she learns who she is and wants to be. She is rivaled by Yukina Fukushima who plays the Yakuza bosses daughter who gets to play her part with insane vigor as she does her best to impress daddy in the family business.
The movie is a fun, exciting romp with tonal shifts that make the film engaging and wonder what direction it will go next.
