If you know me you know I love those Baby Assassins, the adorable pair of professional killers from the movies BABY ASSASSINS, BABY ASSASSINS 2 and BABY ASSASSINS 3, as well as the tv series Baby Assassins Everyday, which I’m currently watching now that it’s on Home Box Office Maximum. (You could start there, if you’re curious.) The Babies are two hilarious young Japanese women who have murdered for a living their whole lives but otherwise are total sweethearts who enjoy soups, desserts, friendship, etc. It’s hard to explain, but they’re the best.
So I didn’t need convincing when I heard some film festival hype about GHOST KILLER and I looked it up and saw it was BABY-adjacent. It’s written by BABY writer/director Yugo Sakamoto, and directed by BABY action director Kensuke Sonomura. You may also know him from directing HYDRA and BAD CITY or from choreographing John Woo’s MANHUNT. He’s developed one of the most distinct and consistent action styles of the modern era. You can’t really go wrong with Sonomura, and for better or worse this has more violence than desserts.
The other connection is that it stars Akari Takaishi, who I know as Chisato, the bubblier of the Babies. Here she plays Fumika, an ordinary college student working a shitty job as a waitress, trying to network for a future career, getting hit on by the awful men she hopes can be mentors. But the world she lives in is just a sugar-coated topping, there is another world beneath it, the real world, where (just like in most of the movies mentioned above) organizations of professional killers are constantly murdering each other and cleaning it up before anyone finds out.
In the opening we see an Adult Assassin named Hideo Kudo (Masanori Mimoto, the star of HYDRA) fighting off a bunch of guys in an alley, killing them all, before being shot by an unseen person he doesn’t expect. A crew comes immediately to dispose of the bodies and clean up the murder scene. The only thing that remains is a bullet casing that gets knocked around throughout the opening credits and, after a long, bad day and night being stranded at a bar with some sleaze after missing her train, Fumika happens to trip right in front of it and pick it up.
That’s where the ghost comes in. Suddenly she finds herself haunted by Kudo. No one else can see him, and any time she gets more than 15 meters away from him he reappears in front of her. Also he accidentally discovers that he can touch her and temporarily control her body. So when her friend Maho (Ayaka Higashino) gets beaten by her asshole boyfriend, Fumika reluctantly accepts Kudo’s help to “punish” the guy. And the guy is extra freaked out because not only is this woman beating the shit out of him but he hears her bickering with the ghost inside her the whole time, providing both sides of the conversation. “Are you high?” he asks.
So it’s sort of a VENOM or UPGRADE situation where she needs to take advantage of his abilities but is uncomfortable about how far he’s going to go when she gives him the keys. She doesn’t really want to be possessed anymore, but she gets a pretty good reason to when Kudo determines a way to end this haunting. Fumika has to help him settle his grudges, which means get revenge on the organization of professional killers that turned on him. But that’s tough odds because even when he was alive he never would’ve tried to take them all on by himself. Also, Fumika has moral qualms about all this. She tries to find ways out, like asking some terrible rapists to turn themselves in to the police. (They laugh at that idea, so they’re fucked.)
Another complication is that because he’s dead, and also excommunicated, he’s lost most of his resources, but Fumika does what she can with what’s available. To get some bodies cleaned up she has to call Kagehara (Mario Kuroba), a guy Kudo never liked when he worked with him in the “antisocial forces,” as she calls them. They end up on the same side, but only after the old rivals duel and argue through poor Fumika. She also has her apartment damaged in a gun fight, and one of her motivations is getting someone to pay for the repairs.
The movie’s world view involves an appropriate hatred for specific types of douchebags – although some of the protagonists are professional killers, the worst guys are the arrogant professional influencers who use date rape drugs with the help of the entire staff of the bar they hang out at. So there are plenty of characters worth killing.
It would be funny if the movie called GHOST KILLER was a cross between the Swayze movie GHOST and John Woo’s THE KILLER. And actually that’s not far off! The former definitely seems like one of its building blocks, with similar rules and goal except that she gets to fight while solving the murder mystery. And I suppose there is a little bit of that Woo in there because Kudo has enough honor to feel bad about accidentally getting her mixed up in this and becomes protective of her.
Takaishi is as great as always, in a more challenging role. She uses some of the same exaggerated expressions as she does as Chisato, as well as the more natural ones, like the above forced smile. But Chisato is too indoctrinated to feel bad about killing, so Funika gets to access emotions she never does. They fight similarly, but Fumika has this added Smeagol element of alternating between a regular scared girl and an adult male badass, sharing the same body, sometimes the former reacting to what the latter is doing through her. Takaishi performs the majority of the action, but sometimes there are cool visual gimmicks like the fight where she keeps going behind posts and coming back out as Mimoto. So we get to enjoy both the actress experienced in choreography and the veteran screen martial artist. Their backgrounds are different but they excel in both disciplines.
Man, Sonomura’s action style is so cool. Even when guns are used there’s all kinds of running and rolling around to avoid being shot, and more time is spent on martial arts, which is always better. There’s an emphasis on small, quick hand movements, often involving slashing with knives. There’s alot of flair as far as spins and slides and things, but the attention to the sounds of the breathing, clothes and foot movements makes them feel more natural and real than many cinematic martial arts scenes. This is not the first of the Sakamoto/Sonomura movies to end up with a big battle in a generic warehouse and still be a nailbiter because the action is so good and we’re so invested in the characters.
That’s partly because they’re grounded with some effective emotions – Kudo is a life-long bastard who kinda starts changing now that he’s dead because he starts to care about Fumika, as does his non-ghost hitman colleague. I like the scene where she breaks down crying after killing the rapists and Kudo drops the tough guy demeanor to try to talk to talk her down. I knew the movie was a winner at the end because they’d been working so hard to exorcise him this whole time and then it was sad that he had to leave. It’s like E.T.
The tone is less silly than BABY ASSASSINS. The score reminds me a little bit of Tangerine Dream in RISKY BUSINESS mode. That works because this one leaves more room for melancholy and regret than the other series. More room to breathe. But there is plenty of humor. And a ghost. It’s a good variation on their established format. Definitely one of my top action movies this year.
GHOST KILLER is available on disc and it’s also on Hi-Yah! if you get it.
