“Baby Assassins: Nice Days” continues the misadventures of the unrivaled Manzai couple of assassin movies. The first two films paved the way for a post-pandemic treatment to the gifted hitman narrative: out with the dark and edgy, in with the cute. In this third installment, however, writer and director Yugo Sakamoto attempts to clash the two styles, resulting in an even more intriguing development for the series.
Baby Assassins: Nice Days is screening at New York Asian Film Festival

While on vacation in Miyazaki, Chisato (Akari Takaishi) suddenly recalls Mahiro’s (Saori Izawa) upcoming birthday. But another hit assignment destroys their celebratory plans. To the duo’s surprise, the target is also booked to another assassin named Fuyumura (Sosuke Ikematsu), a Miyazaki-local freelancer. After crossing bullets and fists with Fuyumura, both parties fail to cross off their target.
In “Nice Days”, the Assassin Guild to which Chisato and Mahiro belong, makes their presence more visible through the uptight supervisor, Minami (Atsuko Maeda). Minami lays down the hit order from the guild on Fuyumura for stealing a target. She personally sees through the duo’s operation.
There are fewer crowds in this third installment, which means fewer of those chaotic gang fights that made the chunk of the first two films unique. Sakamoto seems to design “Nice Days” with more restraint, adding narrative weight to the fight scenes rather than just exhibiting them as spectacles. The treatment has its charms: since most fights are between professional killers, they move poignantly, almost calculated. It makes sense that the skirmishes against Fuyumura seem longer as he is a formidable enemy who sees Mahiro as his ideal rival. Mahiro and Fuyumura’s fights take a lot from boxing where the highlight of “Baby Assassins” movies is deployed: Mahiro overwhelming her enemies despite her small body frame.
What is surprising about “Nice Days” is how Chisato gets more involved in fights Mahiro would have just taken alone like in the first two movies. A lone assassin taking out a gang or having a solo brawl with the gang boss is the convention; a two-on-one is odd, especially if the numbers favor the protagonists. But the quirkiness of the duo makes it work. The greatest part of the charm of the fight scenes Sakamoto and action director Kensuke Sonomura designed for the Baby Assassins movies is that physics does not always align with the skills; even professionals become clumsy in the actual laws of the world. This “Weekly Shonen Jump” treatment, as its director describes, makes the two versus one still a struggle, and so satisfying to see unfold.
Sakamoto’s more narratively-driven approach to “Baby Assassins: Nice Days” highlights the hybrid nature of the franchise: while boasting of going against Hollywood, the influence of Quentin Tarantino‘s “Pulp Fiction” is obvious and has been pointed out by other reviewers of the first two films before. This isn’t really that novel in Japanese films if we consider the attempts of Masahiro Kobayashi to do the same with his 1999 gangster dark comedy “Kaizokuban Bootleg Film.” But in the end, Kobayashi’s a mere repetition of Tarantino. What Sakamoto achieves in the “Baby Assassins” series, if not in his whole oeuvre since 2021, is to push the envelope of popular film form with the help of another popular narrative technique found in shonen manga.
For “Nice Days”, Akari Takaishi and Saori Izawa play Chisato and Mahiro respectively, consistently as they were in the first two Baby Assassins movies, with their moe caricatures contrasting their assassin profession. Adding to the charm is their interaction with the strict Minami who is as contradictory as the two, played greatly by former AKB48 center, Atsuko Maeda. The performance of the three holds the greater half of the film’s baffling, snarky, cute side against Fuyumura’s dark obsessiveness. This extreme mix of Japanese popular culture to aid a complicated plot while holding up a genre cinema high concept, again, was not novel. Sion Sono attempted it multiple times, but even when dealing with matters of violence with another AKB48 idol in 2015’s “Tag”, his obsession with eroticism halts the experimentation, suspending any kind of development in his formal attributes. Sakamoto understands the value of moe within manga and idol culture outside of the merely erotic. This understanding pushes his camera work and editing to more visual expressiveness by juggling the extremes of wide shots and close-ups, and of long takes and rapid cuts.
“Baby Assassins: Nice Days,” while more constrained than the earlier two movies, offers new ways to see what else the series can offer. This can be seen as maturity on the side of Sakamoto where not just the plotting and dialogues consistently peer into the shonen vision, the fight scenes themselves seem to bear heavier weight and intricately weave into the overall story. It is fitting to see the film celebrate itself with this achievement.