Director – Kenichi Fujiwara, Screenplay – Yasutoshi Murakawa, Producer – Masaaki Saito. Production Company – Shibuya Productions.
Kirara Asuka (Kurisu Saotome/Iron Girl), Asami (Poison), Hiroaki Iwananga (Kento Ryuzaki), Ryunosuke Kawai (Kiru), Asuka Kishi (Hanamura Miria)
In the 2040s, World War 3 has broken out and Japan been devastated in a nuclear attack. The country is now a wasteland overrun by gangs of marauders. To deal with this, the provisional authority The Fourth Diamond has sanctioned bounty hunters to take out the worst gangs. One of these bounty hunters is Chris, who has the nickname Iron Girl. She has been enhanced as a cyborg and can turn into a lethal fighting machine at the activation of a button. She also has amnesia about who she is and is trying to save her bounty hunting earnings to buy a machine that can recover memories. She then comes up against a formidable foe in Poison, one of the members of Lord Sparti’s gang.
This was the second entry in the series of Japanese films that began with Iron Girl (2012), which I do not have available for viewing at present. It was followed by Iron Girl: Final Wars (2019).
I wasn’t sure of what to expect but was aware that the Iron Girl films had a softcore element – lead actress Kirara Asuka is an actress in Japanese porn films, for instance. That said, I am not entirely sure I would regard Iron Girl: Ultimate Weapon as a softcore film, as opposed to one where the girls present merely take their tops off with semi-regularity. It is if you like something akin to a 1990s copy of RoboCop (1987) – maybe something like The Demolitionist (1996) – but with liberal amounts of naked female flesh.
The setting of bounty hunters in a world that has fallen into anarchy and disorder reminds something of the first Mad Max (1979) or perhaps even more so Barb Wire (1996), which had a pneumatically-inflated (although not cyborg-enhanced) Pamela Anderson as a similar kickass female bounty hunter in a rundown future. Japan ventured into similar sorts of territory as this with Hard Revenge, Milly (2008) and Hard Revenge, Milly: Bloody Battle (2009), which both took place in a similar kind of socially collapsed future with its heroine who had her arms and legs rebuilt with samurai sword and machine gun attachments seeking revenge. There is also a whole Japanese mini-genre of films about heroines with weird sword and gun body attachments going back to Meatball Machine (2005), The Machine Girl (2008) and Robo Geisha (2009).
Iron Girl: Ultimate Weapon could have worked but it doesn’t. What it suggests it is going to be at the outset is something that hits a comic-book-ish tone, somewhere between Barb Wire and the Hard Revenge, Milly films with a half-nude or fetish-gear clad samurai sword wielding cyborg chick wading into action. However, it transpires in pedestrian ways on almost all of these levels. There is little where Kirara Asuka goes into action and when she does the fight scenes are dully directed and choreographed. There is some nudity, which is neither here nor there, but none of it amounts to anything titillatingly erotic.
Elsewhere, director Kenichi Fujiwara has mostly made action and crime films. In genre material, he also made High School Girl Rika, Zombie Hunter (2008); Female Prisoner No. 701: Sasori (2011), the reboot of a 1970s series about an escaped woman prisoner seeking revenge; the sequel to this, Iron Girl: Final Wars (2019); and Lady Ninja: A Blue Shadow (2018).
Trailer here