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.