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Some years after the conclusion of Scorpion Double Venom, Nami (Chiharu Komatsu) is still on the run. Now apparently using the name Sayuri, that of the surrogate sister she again failed to save in the previous film, she’s been working as a dancer in a club while continuing to look for the one-armed man she believes killed her younger sister. Spotting a one-armed gang boss on TV, she becomes convinced that Goda is the man she’s looking for and becomes a cabaret hostess to get close to him. But before she can pull the trigger, Goda is gunned down by a man in a police uniform who turns out to be a hitman hired by a local gang.
This leaves Scorpion: Double Venom with a problem because Nami no longer has a clear target for her revenge and therefore no reason to live. She takes the gun used to kill Goda and at one point tries to use it to kill herself but is saved by Eiji (Ryo Karato), the hitman she rescued from the scene of the crime. Eiji’s mission of vengeance is however not yet over. Hoping to escape the gangland life, he robbed a bank with his girlfriend Ichiko (Aya Sasaki), but when she got shot in the leg, he ran off with the money and left her there. Nami then becomes determined to rescue Ichiko instead, making use of her old boyfriend, who has since married someone else, to get her a job as the prison doctor.
This is another break with the pattern, as Nami is not a woman in prison but undercover among the corrupt authorities who are in league with the rival yakuza gang to buy cheap drugs to use on the inmates while forcing released prisoners to deal for them. Forced into a straitjacket and sedated, Ichiko is repeatedly raped by the warden’s henchman. A female guard then takes her own life because she can no longer bear to listen to Ichiko’s screams, only the prison get a backstreets doctor to falsify the death certificate to eliminate evidence they’d been drugging her too and make it look like she died in an accident.
Sucked into a yakuza gang war, Nami is constrained by the darkness of the world around her and once again uses her medical skills for the purposes of revenge. The irony of her using a scalpel to kill is not lost on anyone, though this time she does also use healing abilities to nurse Eiji back to health which might explain the Japanese title “Killing Angel” even if there’s a serious plot hole along given some vague sci-fi style justifications in the film’s closing moments as Nami finally learns some unwelcome information about her sister’s death. In a way, the ending the brings the cycle full circle as Nami is one again betrayed by a man she had trusted and bonded with in a shared desire for justice and liberation.
In essence, they’re all trying to escape the prison of the wider society but as Nami discovers, society is not exactly tolerant of fugitives from order and the implications of the ambiguous ending are fairly bleak. It seems that once again, Nami has been denied her vengeance and granted only a cruel irony that suggests there can be no escape or starting over for those like Nami nor can there be closure for the traumatic past. While trying to rescue Ichiko, she’d encountered one of her former cellmates who had become a turncoat, taking the place of the guard who had killed themselves to facilitate Ichiko’s perpetual rapes. She at first refuses to help Nami because her parole is coming up, but then changes her mind, takes a shot at her own vengeful protest and pays a heavy price for it.
Moving away from the exploitation roots of the franchise, Niimura takes the sequel in an artier direction with its love scene montage and melancholy blue-tinged colour palette while scaling back a little on the action preferring to focus on Nami’s non-romance with Eiji until her daring attempt to break Ichiko out of prison. But as has become abundantly clear, no one is able to escape from the prison of contemporary Japan and least of all Nami who remains trapped by her desire for vengeance and perhaps a willing victim of it.
Windows on Worlds 