Cool Dimension: Innocent
Assassin
Director: Yoshikazu
Ishii
Year: 2006
Rating: 3.0
Back in the 1990s there was a flurry of
low-budget Japanese Girls with Guns films that were straight to video. Titles
like the Beautiful series, the Zero Women series, the Gun Crazy series, Black
Angel, Prisoner Maria and Sasori 701. These were enjoyable to some degree
- attractive female killers fashionably dressed, suitably generic plots and
for the budget a little stylish. And they were picked up by American distributors
on dvds. I saw them all. Perhaps this film was the tail-end of that genre,
but it makes those low-budget films mentioned look like The Fall of the Roman
Empire in contrast. This is so dreadful - shot in dull poorly lit colors,
acting from a high school play and though it comes in at a tidy 72-minutes,
chunks of time are spent just idly shooting static scenes for no reason.
It had potential I suppose.
A Charlie Angels scenario with Kurokawa
(Ken'ichi Endô - a very familiar face - nearly 300 films - most better
than this one I expect) has three good-looking women working for him. But
not as detectives - instead as assassins. Cool. I like female assassins.
There are not enough of them. Female empowerment. Shiori (Yoko Mitsuya),
Junko (Mika Shigeizumi) and Mika (Mitsuho Otani) make a nice team of killers.
In the first kill, Shiori walks into a night club and takes out a few bodyguards
before putting her gun under the man's jaw and pulling the trigger. Mika
is waiting outside to take out any chasers and Junko has the car ready. All
three in tight leather displaying cleavage.
A decent start but then the film comes to
a plodding stop for nearly the rest of the running time. They get another
target and spend way too much time looking for him. Shiori has her chance
but her appetite for killing is fading. In a weird scene a politician hires
a man to have sex with his daughter - nudity ahead - as he watches and blows
out smoke rings - and then tells him to leave and finishes the job. Where
did that come from? Everything looks so cheap - even the five girl hoodlum
group who show up near the end. Then the film almost made me glad that I
stayed with it with a nice surprising ending where things get fun again.
but that middle was like swimming through Jello.
