2 Baby 2 Assassin.

It’s safe to say that I really enjoy Baby Assassins as a series. Directed and written by Yugo Sakamoto, Baby Assassins 2 is very likely the hit sequel to Baby Assassins. And how do you raise the stakes after having a film with a team of young assassins? Two teams of young assassins!

Baby Assassins 2 brings back our favorite characters from Baby Assassins; Akari Takaishi returns as Chisato Sugimoto, professional assassin and best friend of Mahiro Fukagawa (Saori Izawa) who is absolutely a sociopath. Tsubasa Tobinaga is back as their manager Mr. Susano who has the unfortunate duty of suspending the pair after they beat the crap out of some bank robbers while trying to pay back their multi-million yen debt.

Atomu Mizuishi is back as Mr. Tasaka, the surly cleaner, and he’s brought with him Tomo Nakai as Ms. Muyauchi who is always cheerful. The main cast is fantastic and always adorable. It’s always a treat to see Izawa whose character is always low-energy and exhausted suddenly turn the lights on and become this extreme fighting machine.

Yuri Kamimura (Joey Iwanaga) and Makoto (Tatsuomi Hamada) are the male gender flips of Fukugawa and Sugimoto. The two are not full on assassins, but they are instead subcontractors of the same assassin guild that our protagonists work for full time. They have dreams of working for the big guys full time, and their handler Mr. Akagi (Junpei Hashino) tells them that rumor on the street is that they can get into the guild if there’s an opening. Which means it’s time to kill two full-time assassins. You know where this is going.

Baby Assassin 2 is a deeply silly movie and carries on a good amount of the spirit from the first film. It has a lot of scenes with characters chatting about business stuff. The two boy assasssins are basically just mirror opposites of Fukugawa and Sugimoto, with one of them being the brooding type and the other one more cheerful. They are functionally incompetent in real life, not being able to ask the restaurant girl on a date for being too nervous.

Also he eats Churu cat sticks, as does Fukugawa, but they disagree on which flavor is their favorite.

There’s a good few fight scenes in this movie, but it’s mostly a slow burn of talking, and talking, and talking. Baby Assassins feels like if Quentin Tarantino was Japanese and made films there but without the racism. It’s a film that incorporates assassin stuff into normal daily life, like wouldn’t it be annoying if you were going to the bank to pay off your loans and got there right before the deadline, but the place got robbed?

Baby Assassins 2 is more of the first movie without being a retread of the first movie. It’s great.

Rating: A