There is a moment, maybe forty minutes in, where Ikko and Zill perform a fully synchronized hip hop routine in their hotel room, right there in front of a clamshell bed that looks like it was borrowed from a love hotel catalog. The camera holds steady. They hit every beat. It has nothing to do with anything, serves no narrative purpose whatsoever, and yet I keep coming back to it because it is the most honest thing in the entire film: pure, unapologetic style announcing itself without permission or apology.
Takashi Ishii knows he is working with limitations here. The budget shows in every deserted warehouse, every dimly lit hallway that doubles for three different locations. But he attacks those constraints with such ferocious visual energy that you almost forget you are watching the same corner filmed from six angles. That five minute unbroken tracking shot of Ikko trying to escape her captors, the camera following her like a persistent ghost as she runs in circles through an abandoned floor, encountering resistance at every turn: it should not work. There is no reason for it except that Ishii wanted to prove he could do it, and the sheer chutzpah makes you forgive the fact that the geography makes no sense and the henchmen seem to be spawning from thin air.
Riona Hazuki as Ikko has this chipmunk energy, wide eyed and determined, and she commits completely to every absurd action beat Ishii throws at her. Watching her leap from a high floor, firing her gun mid fall like she is auditioning for a John Woo film, then hitting the ground in a roll and continuing to shoot: it is ridiculous. It knows it is ridiculous. The film does not wink at you about it, though. It plays it straight, and Hazuki sells it with such earnest intensity that you either go with it or check out entirely.
Reiko Takashima's Black Angel, however, is where the film finds something closer to genuine pathos. The contrast between the legendary assassin who saved young Ikko and the hollowed out addict we meet in the present lands harder than it should. Takashima plays Mayo's dissolution with a kind of heavy lidded resignation, and when she and Ikko finally confront each other, there is real weight to the disappointment. Your heroes do not always stay heroic; sometimes they just get tired and make bad deals with worse people.
Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi's Zill is pure chaos. He speaks Japanese but does not recognize rice cakes. He raps about his sexuality. He moves like he is on a permanent amphetamine high. The film never explains him, never justifies his presence beyond "Ikko needed a sidekick," and honestly, that refusal to explain becomes its own kind of charm. He exists in his own frequency, and the film just lets him.
The plot, when you step back from the neon and the gunfire, is pure pulp: yakuza power struggles, hidden parentage, betrayals layered on betrayals. Raymond Chandler territory, as one description aptly noted, but filtered through Ishii's exploitation film sensibility. It is more restrained than his Angel Guts work, certainly, more interested in being a commercial genre piece than pushing boundaries. The violence is brutal without being grotesque, the sexuality present but not dominating. This feels like Ishii trying to make something that could play wider while still indulging his stylistic impulses.
Where it falters is in the pacing. That middle stretch, the endless cycle of interrogations and shootouts and flashing nightclub lights, starts to blur together. The fog machines work overtime. Every scene is bathed in blues and reds until your eyes start to glaze over. The dirty cop subplot goes nowhere interesting. The car crashes feel obligatory. You can feel Ishii padding runtime, cycling through his bag of tricks because he needs to get to feature length.
But then that dance sequence happens, or the Black Angel stumbles through a scene with such wasted grace, or Ikko does something impossibly acrobatic, and the film snaps back into focus. It reminds me of certain Johnnie To films from this era, that same commitment to style as substance, though To had better scripts and Ishii has more raw punk energy.
This will connect with viewers who have a high tolerance for style over coherence, who can appreciate a filmmaker swinging for the fences with limited resources. If you grew up on Girls with Guns cinema from the late 90s, if you have affection for that specific flavor of Japanese direct to video ambition, this delivers. If you need your action films to make logical sense, if unmotivated dance breaks and physics defying gunplay irritate rather than charm you, this will test your patience quickly.
