It stars Kei Satou! I love that bloke. He's a classy actor who was one of Nagisa Oshima's regulars and here plays the Target Who Needs To Die, so you know that side of things will be solid. He arranges (and observes) an assassination. At one point, he's about to murder his own brother.

The, er, heroes of this franchise are still Edo-era assassins. Give them money and they'll stick a needle through your spinal cord. You couldn't call this lovable, but again they're doing that balancing act of being cool and charming enough to keep you watching. The 1970s were particularly good at that.

However, everything depends on the baddies. A film about murderer protagonists is more likely to entertain an audience if we're happy that their targets thoroughly deserve it. That's true here. A mother was raped and hanged herself, even though she was pregnant. Kei Satou lurks underneath everything, but isn't the only person who matters.

The sleaze is mild. There's an unfaithful wife and another scene of lots of women in a public bath, but that's it. That public bath is mixed, incidentally, and the men pay the women no attention.

It's pretty good. I don't think the story ever surprised me, but that's okay. Its formula works pretty well. There's also a welcome return for a minor character from the first film whose overacting again made me laugh. Would I watch this series's other instalments? The third film, yes, because I'm a completist, but I haven't been able to find a copy. The TV series, though... holy cow, you must be joking. It has millions of episodes. There's no way I'm ploughing through all that. It ran mostly non-stop from 1972 to 1987, plus revivals in 1991 and 2009, and today it's still going as a series of annual two-hour TV movies.

It's probably not as good as the first film, but it's perfectly okay. Kei Satou is always worth your time.