The best action movie franchise of the 2020s is about a couple of teenage slackers who, when they aren’t being incredibly lazy, work as hired killers. The first Baby Assassins saw our heroes, Mahiro (Saori Izawa) and Chisato (Akari Takaishi), graduate high school and be forced, for tax purposes, to live together and find real jobs. The second (Baby Assassins: 2 Babies) saw them in need of jobs again, this time to pay their hitman insurance premiums and also for a gym membership they never used but still had to cough up for. Action scenes bookended those films, while the middle was filled out with the two girls simply hanging around, cracking each other up, and failing to fit into regular society, while a fuller world of weirdos — yakuza, boys, other killers, and the people who facilitate and clean up after killers — was filled in around them.
This third film, which premiered at the NYAFF before its local release, finds the girls, for once, not facing any financial concerns. Instead, they are on vacation to the beachfront area of Miyazaki on the island of Kyushu in southern Japan, where they are to perform a hit. That job gets complicated when another killer shows up to do the same thing. He’s a freelancer named Kaede, working outside of the hitman union structure, and so they’re tasked with killing the scab as well. Kaede is played by Sôsuke Ikematsu, who starred as the Shin Kamen Rider last year and also in Between the White Key and the Black Key, the opening film of 2024 Japan Cuts, the other big East Asian film festival taking place in July.
This entry in the series is more action-packed, by far, than either of the first two. It’s again choreographed by Sonomura Kensuke, and again mostly stands as a showcase for Izawa, the single greatest action movie star to emerge over the last decade or so. Dressed in baggy clothes with long bangs covering her eyes, Izawa affects a kind of skater aesthetic (she performs the finale wearing a Fugazi T-shirt), befitting her character’s Bartleby-esque slacker defiance. The clothes too enhance her fighting style, which is built around quick movements and feints, slithering in and around her opponent, into and out of clutches and wrestling holds, alternating with quick jabs, leg sweeps, and blocks. Izawa and Sonomura’s fights are lovely, fast, and fascinatingly tactical; they have a rhythm and logic to them that are exceedingly rare in mainstream cinema, and in English-language film almost only found at the margins, in the straight-to-video/streaming bargain bins. Takaishi acquits herself well in the fights too, but her role is largely as a shooter. It’s clear she’s more of an actress playing at being an action star than the real deal.
The fights are spread throughout Nice Days, rather than being confined to just the opening and closing, which means it plays like much more of a conventional movie than any of Sakamoto’s other films — which include A Janitor, a more traditional yakuza film wherein he first paired Izawa and Takaishi as assassins, albeit different characters, and Yellow Dragon Village, a very clever riff on the slasher film. There are action beats every 10-15 minutes or so here, with the in-between drama and comedy coming from the lone hitman’s deteriorating psychological state and the Baby Assassins’ interactions with their colleagues, respectively. None of this is as weird or exciting as the restaurant the girls’ worked at in the first film or Chisato’s street chess game in the second, but it’s still pretty fun and actually serves a thematic purpose, something Sakamoto was ambitious enough to avoid doing with the first two movies.
Mahiro and Chisato are joined by another pair of killers from their firm, a dim-witted but sweet bodybuilder and a hard-nosed older woman named Minami (played by Atsuko Maeda, star of Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s To the Ends of the Earth). Minami is seven or so years older than our heroes, but she’s appalled by their slacker manners and lifestyle, which she credits to the generation gap between millennials like herself and Gen-Z. Eventually, they all get along well enough to do their work, while Kaede, the solo artist, slowly goes insane. The message here is about the virtues of community, especially in the work environment. Chisato and Mahiro and Minami are all sociopaths, without a doubt, but they’re able to function thanks to their friendships and working relationships with other people. Kaede is just as much a sociopath, but without the backing of a union or a team of partners to look out for him and help him along the way, he loses his mind. He’s also being compensated horribly for his work, being told to kill 150 people for a measly paycheck. A strong union would never allow labor to be exploited in such a manner. Instead, its members even get a beach vacation every once in a while. And maybe even a trip to a nice restaurant to enjoy Miyazaki’s famous beef.
Published as part of NYAFF 2024.
