Directed and written by Yugo Sakamoto, Baby Assassins follows two assassins, Chisato Sugimoto (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro Fukagawa (Saori Izawa), who are tasked with playing housemates to strengthen their work chemistry while partnered for their guild\u2019s contract killings. The only problem is they\u2019re both very different brands of weird girls who mix like oil and water. Mahiro, the hand-to-hand specialist, is a soft-spoken, game-obsessed, L Lawliet-type who struggles to make normal conversation without sounding so matter-of-fact that she might as well be an alien on her first day pretending to be human. Meanwhile, Chisato is a loud, extroverted gremlin of a girl who says whatever\u2019s on her mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Basically, Baby Assassins is an unofficial live-action adaptation of Lycoris Recoil<\/a>, a cute girls do hitman things anime by Cloverworks that Hideo Kojima<\/a>, acclaimed cinephile, accidentally stumbled upon<\/a> and is rightfully obsessed with<\/a>. However, by the time I hit the second film, Baby Assassins 2: Babies (my favorite one), the series went further beyond Lycoris Recoil’s levels of \u201cAre they?\u201d sapphic underpinnings and went full-blown Nana<\/a> with how gay gay homosexual gay Chisato and Mahiro are for one another.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Throughout the trilogy, I witnessed their dynamic evolve in real time from \u201cstay out of my way\u201d begrudging coworker to mutual-chin-cupping-to-wipe-away-blood-smears from each other’s cheeks, intimate \u201cdon\u2019t die on me\u201d forehead-touching, and making goofy faces at each other during waist-high shootouts. The trilogy\u2019s narrative arcs, which make up a majority of their runtime, boil down to \u201cWe try to get normal jobs. We try to pay rent on time. We try to enjoy our workcation birthday party without catching stray bullets.\u201d It\u2019s essentially a workplace wives version of Meals on Wheels, ditching the sigma male stoicism of Wick-clones for whimsy, cringe, and fruity roommate chaos.\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead of perpetuating the Wick-ification of action cinema, Baby Assassins mocks it. The girls openly clown on edgy one-liner villains and one-dimensional tough guys, calling out their cringeworthy lines in real time. As someone raised on Lee\u2019s philosophy, Chan\u2019s slapstick, and Li\u2019s charm, Baby Assassins was a breath of fresh air because it\u2019s rich with low-stakes hijinks and hard-hitting action choreography with coveted long shots to let its stunt crew, especially Izawa, show off their stuff uninhibited. All the while, it\u2019s an action comedy that doesn\u2019t take itself too seriously.\u00a0<\/p>\n And, most importantly, the action slaps. Each film\u2019s finale fight scene is like a hearty dessert at the end of a four-course meal\u2014long takes, inventive choreography, and zero-overediting to be found. In fact, Mahiro\u2019s stunt work is so phenomenal that John Wick 4 director Chad Stahelski tapped her to do stunts for Rina Sawayama as Akira<\/a>. Takaishi, meanwhile, brings her anime stage production chops from Toilet-bound Hanako-kun<\/a>, Fate\/Grand Order<\/a>, and Demon Slayer<\/a> to the role of Chisato, enriching her gun-girl persona with \u201coh, you know ball\u201d levels of otaku insight and deep-pull observations. Chisato is also just based about most things, like Twitter being a hellhole.\u00a0<\/p>\n Action movies could stand to be less of a downer, and Baby Assassins is the cure. You can be silly and still kick ass.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Modern action cinema owes a lot to The Raid and John Wick as mythic revenge arcs littered with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128347,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-128346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Chisato](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Baby-Assassins-1.3.png\")
![\"Mahiro](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Baby-Assassins-1.2.png\")
There is no heterosexual explanation for this. <\/p>\n![\"Mahiro](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Baby-Assassins-1.1.png\")
Tubi\/Shibuya Productions<\/p>\n