★★★
“2 Much 2 Young”
After the unexpected pleasure of Baby Assassins, it’s more or less back to the same well for the sequel. Young slacker assassins Chisato (Takaishi) and Mahiro (Izawa) are still gamboling casually through life, staggering from one adult problem to the next. The latest crisis is a massive unpaid gym bill, accumulated and ignored for several years. At the bank to pay it off, they have the misfortune to be there during a robbery, and their dispatch of the perps gets them suspended from the assassins’ association, for unapproved use of their skills. As in the first film, menial work beckons, in this case as business mascots. It… does not go well.
Bigger problems lurk, in the shape of lower-tier assassins Yuri Kamimura (Iwanaga) and Makoto Kamimura (Hamada). They want in to the association, and the benefits which come with it – I guess, pensions, healthcare and paid time off. But the only way in, is to create vacancies by killing current members. No prizes for guessing which two come into their crosshairs. It makes for an interesting contrast, with the two young men not dissimilar to the two young women. They’re close friends, yet are in many ways socially inept: there’s an ongoing plot thread about Makoto being too shy, to ask out a waitress on whom he has a crush. They don’t have quite the same food obsession though: witness the extended post-credit discussion about dumplings between Chisato and Mahiro.
Initially, this seems like a lot of fun, through approximately the point of thebattle between the two heroines in their gigantic headed mascot costumes. However, it feels as if the makers don’t have enough ideas, beyond recycling concepts from last time: the mascot work feels like a mild spin on their equally unsuitable maid cafe jobs. It leaves things stretched thin. I don’t think the women actually carry out any genuine assassinations in the entire 101-minute running-time. There is, instead, discussion about desserts, an extended game of shogi, and a lot of references which I suspect may make considerably more sense to a local audience. This is fair enough, considering it was made for a local audience. It just left me feeling it should have come with liner notes.
The action remains decent though, being both imaginative and well-executed. The bank robbery was a particular highlight, and the inevitable climax, pitting our pair against the duo who have been hunting them, also works and makes good use of the environments. The characters are still fun to be around, and enough of the absurdist humour works, to make for decent enough entertainment – albeit a step below its predecessor. However, if there are any further installments in the lives of Chisato and Mahiro, I hope to see more rigour in the structure. The novelty value of just hanging out with them has now definitively worn off, and I’d need to see development of an actual, significant plot to convince me it’s worth my while.
Dir: Yugo Sakamoto
Star: Akari Takaishi, Saori Izawa, Joey Iwanaga, Tatsuomi Hamada
a.k.a. Baby Assassins: 2 Babies