Baby Assassins 2 - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Baby Assassins 2



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



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Movie
I remember back in 2022 when I reviewed Baby Assassins that it wouldn’t shock me to see a sequel to the Japanese film. I’m usually a bit critical of the Hi-Yah! films due to being just low budget DTV films for Well Go USA, but Baby Assassins was the first time in a while I had a BLAST while watching it. So much so that I was actually hoping they would create a sequel. So here we are, two years later, and I got exactly what I wished for.

Mahiro (Saori Izawa) and Chisato (Akari Takaishi), the two baby faced female assassins, are back once more. This time they’re under fire from two different directions for two different reasons. On one side of the equation they have a pair of male assassins after them after they figure out they can get a promotion if they wipe Mahiro and Chisato out of the equation. However, the 20 year old girls aren’t about to let a couple of up and comers wipe them out so easily either. Simultaneously the girls have been suspended for not paying their gym membership for over 5 years and racking up a HUGE bill (including the late fees) and their bosses are not going to bail them out. This means that Mahiro and Chisato once more have to get part time jobs to pay off their loans.

However, push quickly turns into shove when two rival assassins show up and start causing trouble for the girls. At first they kick the guys butts and think they’ve moved on, but the newbies are not going to take no for an answer, and end up shooting and nearly killing the assassin guild cleaner who suspended them. Now the gloves are off and both girls are about to unleash some serious pain on the new guys if they have their way. Suspension be darned.

Honestly, I had a ball with the first movie, and had nearly as much fun this time around. Both Saroi and Akari are hilarious as the funny girls and straight girl, and the entire film plays out as a live action manga. LITERALLY, a live action manga. The jokes, the girls interactions, and even the fight scenes are all ripped straight out of Japanese Anime and manga, and it actually WORKS for some reason. The film is chaotic, goofy, and slapstick to the extreme, but it’s also combined with some high octane gunfights and hand to hand combat scenes that the first movie did so well.

The one minor complaint I had with the film was due to the fact that the action felt toned down a bit. It was more polished, more cohesive, but it was less brutal and less copious than the first movie. Instead they focused more on the girls relationships with each other and the new assassins rather than go full gonzo on us. A small nitpick, but one that made me deduct half a star from the thing. On the flip side, the fight scenes were really well choreographed (Sario Izawa is a VERY talented stunt woman as her career) and the gun battles were quick and nasty. Little bit of a nerd moment here, but being that the girls are very diminutive and sleek themselves, I really appreciated that they went with Springfield 1911’s (Mahiro using what looked like a Springer TRP in .45, and Chisato a Springer Model V10 officers frame) rather than the huge and clunky HK USP’s from the previous film. I know it’s really weird, but the slick and slim nature of the combat 1911s really meshes well with the girls fight styles, while the USP has always been a heavy and fat gun that fits better in larger hands and body sizes.




Rating:

Not Rated by the MPAA




Video:

Baby Assassins 2 is presented on 1080p Blu-ray with a fairly great looking 2.39:1 AVC encode. I didn’t see any logos anywhere, and IMDB is expectedly devoid of any filming information online, so I can only surmise from my eyes that this was most likely a 2K master from a digital source. Like many Japanese film, it’s heavily ambered and yellowed with the color grading, combining bright colors and weird pastels blended together as the general aesthetic. Many shots are simply superb, with razor sharp clarity and precise detailing (think the scene where their cleaner gets shot), but also, the heavy yellow/amber color grading combined with the obviously shoe string budget makes for a mildly soft film the other 50% of the time. In general the picture is quite good, so most people will still be quite pleased with what they get, but the budget limitations and obvious strange Japanese film making aesthetics keeps it from being top tier.









Audio:

TLike the original, Baby Assassins 2 comes with a highly kinetic and bombastic sound design that makes great use of surrounds, bass channel and ambiance equally. Sure there’s some heavily front focused events such as the girls in their costumes for their work, but there’s so many gun battles and crazy music going on that you feel like you’re in the middle of the chaotic gonzo whirlwind that is the twi assassins “job”. There’s some great discrete surround placement, such as kicks smashing into faces in slow motion, bullets bouncing off of cement, and the bombastic score that likes to go full crazy at times. All in all, a very nice track, although I did notice some milder bass response than the first movie (I actually pulled out the first film and compared at comparable level matched audio volumes, and yup, slightly less bass).












Extras:

• Trailer
• Well Go USA Previews

Final Score:
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Baby Assasins 2 is just about as fun as the predecessor, just with them leaning more into the live action anime/manga trope this go around. The action is faster paced, with some classy gun fights that work well with the gonzo nature of the film. I only wished there had been a bit MORE action ala the first film. Well, that and the fact that there are no real extras outside of trailers (which is pretty typical of most Well Go USA titles, so it’s not unexpected). Still, fun watch for those of you who like the genre of Japanese action films.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Akari Takaishi, Saori Izawa, Oto Abe, Junpei Hashino, Tatsuomi Hamada
Directed by: Yugo Sakamoto
Written by: Yugo Sakamoto
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 AVC
Audio: Japanese: DTS-HD MA 5.1, Japanese DD 2.0
Subtitles: English
Studio: Well Go USA
Rated: NR
Runtime: 101 minutes
Blu-Ray Release Date: April 2nd, 2024

Recommendation: Fun Watch