Ghost Killer (2024) – Review

Quick Thoughts:

1. Director Kensuke Sonomura has crafted a fun showcase for his exciting fight choreography.

2. There’s a great gag involving salt. 

3. Watch the Baby Assassin franchise.

4. Masanori Mimoto, Akari Takaishi and Mario Kuroba are wonderful

5. The world needs more movies like Ghost Killer. I love it when silly ideas are taken seriously. 

Directed by Kensuke Sonomura, the action director of the Baby Assassins franchise (and many more films), and written by Yugo Sakamoto (who directed the three Baby Assassin films), Ghost Killer is a wonderful supernatural action comedy that features cursed bullet cartridges, apartment destruction, and a college student teaming up with the ghost of a hitman to battle an anti-social organization. The world needs more movies like Ghost Killer because it takes a high-concept idea and treats it with respect.

The film kicks off with a fast-paced action scene between a hitman named Hideo Kudo (Masanori Mimoto – The badass Frog from Yakuza Apocalypse) and a gang of knife-wielding opponents who fall prey to Kudo’s fast hands (and multiple stab wounds). To celebrate the victory, Kudo lets down his guard to smoke a post-murder cigarette and is shot by an unknown assailant. While he lay bleeding out, his grudge-holding blood covers the expelled bullet cartridge on the ground next to his body. This attaches his soul to the bullet cartridge and bonds them together. After being kicked around Tokyo, the cartridge is picked up by Fumika Matsuoka (Akari Takaishi), a college student who justifiably freaks out when she learns that the grudge-bearing soul of a hitman is attached to her. After discovering she can’t escape (and salt exorcisms don’t work) the “genuine ghost” because he reappears in front of her whenever there’s a 15 meter distance between them, Fumika decides to work with Kudo by letting him possess her body so he can kill the person who killed him – which will set his soul free.

The most interesting part of Ghost Killer is that a world-class hitman uses an unathletic college kid as his vendetta machine. When it comes to trained fighters, they know how it feels to absorb strikes, and they’ve trained their bodies to deliver punishment. However, the mild-mannered Fumika has never been close to a fight, and the first punch she lands makes her say, “That really hurts.” After each fight, Fumika is left bruised and battered, but she also really wants to get rid of the hitman ghost attached to her, so she endures broken ribs, bruised knuckles, and bloody noses. Her battles put her in the crosshairs of an “anti-social organization” that justifiably wants to kill her because she’s teamed up with the vengeful ghost of a deadly hitman.

During Hideo and Fumika’s supernatural adventures, they come across Riku Kagehara (Mario Kuroba), a hitman frenemy associate of Hideo who helps them murder people and clean up their bodies. The film builds to a warehouse brawl where the ragtag crew battles an endless barrage of gangsters led by famed stuntman and action choreographer Naohiro Kawamoto, who has a beautiful, rapid-fire brawl with Mimoto. 

In the Baby Assassin’s franchise, Takaishi’s character Chisato is an absolute maniac, so it’s fun watching her play a normal (non-murder-y) college kid in Ghost Killer. Also, in Baby Assassins, Saori Izawa does most of the heavy-lifting during the fight scenes, but in Ghost Killer, Takaishi battles abusive boyfriends, jerk influencers, and a plethora of gangsters. It’s fun watching her take center stage, it’s enough to satisfy my Baby Assassins cravings as I wait for Baby Assassins 3.