Rating (2.5 out of 5)
Unless you like Japanese martial arts film Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril is a 1.5 for you.
Oh no what a mess, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril can’t hold a candle to any of its predecessors. Baby Cart in Peril is one to miss in the series.
Plot: The Samurai Itto Ogami (Tomisaburô Wakayama) and his son Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) continue their journey, accepting assassination assignments on the way.
What I Liked: The female assassin who has tattoos on her upper torso. She displays the tatoos and her naked upper torso to distract her victims. The movie opens up with her taking out four warriors and blood splattered over 1/2 naked body. Itto talks to the artist who did the tatoo and the artist explains tatooing the woman. I enjoyed the build-up of the story and his victim.
The small traveling band of musicians and minstrels trying to kill him created an element of fun and created nice distraction. Liked how you saw them before in the city and then they appear again in more remote areas, where they go after Itto.
What I Didn’t Like: The music in all the films has a distinct 1970’s vibe and always a bit strange. In Baby Cart in Peril a new director tried to mix the sound up which resulted in a distracting sound track.
I can’t recall the narration in previous Lone Wolf and Cub’s but the narration didn’t flow well into rest of the film. The narrator explained Daigoro’s actions which they haven’t done in previous fils. Watching the previous movies provided the context as to why Daigoro visited these locations, making the narration unnecessary.
A person changes his face to look like one of his fellow warriors. The scene resembled a bad 70’s horror movie than a martial art movie. Really, whatever he did to his face, fooled the Shogun, especially after his head was sliced off his body?
Itto is a bad ass, but the large number of bad guys (about 50) and those with guns made the final battle fantasy rather than fiction. He runs through a maze of sorts and slowly works his way through all of them. Fantasy!
The graphic portrayal of rape increased over previous films and took away from the film. The direction of the rape scene condones rape versus making rape taboo, as in the previous films. They could have cut away or altered the scene slightly. We only needed to understand the cause of her pain.
Conclusion: Watch the first 15 minutes and you have watched the best part of Baby Cart in Peril. If you insist on watching more stop at the hour mark when he completes the assassination. The movie next 1/2 hour just falls apart.