'Green Bullet': Assassin sextet brings on the action

A female warrior who is a formidable adversary for any man is not new to Japanese films: Junko Fuji was playing one in yakuza movies half a century ago. The latest iteration of this premise is “Green Bullet,” action specialist Yugo Sakamoto’s fast-paced follow-up to his 2021 “Legendary Hit-man, Kunioka,” though acquaintance with the previous movie is optional.

As I watched the film’s six outsider protagonists training to be hitwomen, I was reminded of “One Cut of the Dead,” Shinichiro Ueda’s smash-hit 2018 zombie comedy. “Green Bullet” features the same ultra-low-budget, shot-on-the-fly aesthetic, as well as an ending that surprises and uplifts, though Sakamoto’s film is not as ingeniously plotted.

Born in 1996 and directing since the age of 20, Sakamoto has been churning out action films at a frantic pace in recent years, with four hitting theaters in 2021. As a result, “Green Bullet” may have less polish than Toichiro Ruto’s similarly themed “Violence Action,” which was released last month, but its action scenes deliver a more realistic gut-punch impact, despite their jokey, mockumentary framing.

For example, Sakamoto and his collaborators, including action director Makoto Sakaguchi, convey how a blast from a shotgun fired at short range can knock a human body flat. Instead of cartoonish martial arts sequences with intricate ballet-like choreography, they give us fights with fists and knives that resemble training videos for commando squads, with brutal efficiency taking priority over beauty.

We’re first introduced to the central sextet as they are being interviewed for a documentary about a training camp for aspiring assassins, backed by sketchy entrepreneur Ichise (Makoto Saki). The group consists of slacker Fumika (Karen Izumi), who spends all day watching TikTok and opines that “killing might be fun”; wannabe actor Yui (Yui Tsuji), who confesses to paying a small fortune to her fly-by-night talent agency; hard-shelled, punkish Hibiki (Karen Naito), who boasts of beating a stalker to a pulp; and Mika (Miyabi Yamaoka) and Haruka (Kiki Amano), inseparable pals who are fans of their instructor, the famed hitman Kunioka (Masayuki Inou).

The strangest by far, though, is Risa (Rino Oshima). Raised by a disciplinarian hitman father, she sounds and acts like a do-or-die soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army, treating the bemused Kunioka as her commanding officer.

At the shooting range, however, Risa turns out to be a lousy shot — all that fatherly badgering has made her freeze with fear every time she pulls the trigger. And despite a pep talk from Ichise, who tells his charges they can all become rich, she makes no improvement.

This character comedy, focusing on the trainees’ various quirks, is sharp and funny enough, but the film’s central conceit — a school for assassins as a sloppily run, disaster-plagued summer camp — starts to wear thin halfway through, especially when the trainees jarringly start to practice on live human targets.

The story gets a welcome energy boost, however, when a formidable threat appears — a group of armed and masked men who call themselves “fox hunters” and kill humans for sport in the woods. After they target the training camp, the trainees, who have already shown themselves to be bumblers at their chosen profession, must fight for their lives.

Watching the ensuing full-throttle mayhem, I couldn’t help but hope that Sakamoto would someday get a budget big enough to allow his fertile imagination free rein. For the time being, “Green Bullet” is a good example of how to create enjoyable action entertainment from nothing.