The tax evaders this time -- land speculators fronted by a religious cult, and backed by an army of hooligans who do not stop short of murder -- are bigger fish than last time; and their very bigness kills some of what seemed to be the humor -- the burlesque of gangbuster films -- in the original. The heroine's fearlessness in the face of this quarry certainly doesn't detract from her own funniness, and she (the enchanting Nobuko Miyamoto) avoids the malady so rampant among the protagonists of sequels, that of taking any steps backwards and having to go over the same ground again. (Though her hairdresser has taken no forward steps to cure her cowlick.) On the other hand, the bad hand, she has a much tougher time even getting into the new plot. So, too, in another sense, might you. The byzantinism of the scheme, like the moral rot that set it in motion, is all too real, all too near the financial page of the daily paper. Which is another way of saying all too unfunny. And without the episodic sidetrips of the original film, without the introductory character interest, there is no relief from it. What nevertheless keeps the movie watchable, even when Miyamoto is off screen, is Juzo Itami's punchy visual style, a darting, high-impact style that owes its effect to clear-eyed photography and artful composition (in what looks to be the old, boxy, pre-Cinemascope frame), and not to the sort of pumped-in atmospherics favored by the Tony and Ridley Scotts of the world. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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