This film begins with the yakuza assassin named "Goro Fujikawa" (Tetsuya Watari) being sent by his new crime boss "Mikimoto" (Nakajiro Tomita) to collect a gambling debt from a man by the name of "Sawada" (Ryoji Hayama). Although a brief fight breaks out when he gets there, Goro hesitates when Sawada's wife "Aki" (Chikage Ogi) gets between them and begs Goro to stop. Noticing that Aki is quite ill, Goro agrees and tells them to escape through the back door as Mikimoto's men are waiting in a car out front. Unfortunately, one of these men was just happened to be secretly watching the fight, and upon overhearing their conversation, quickly intercepts Sawada in the yard. And even though Goro belatedly tries to help Sawada. He arrives too late to prevent him from being fatally stabbed. To that effect, just minutes before he dies, Sawada asks Goro to make sure his ill wife gets to Nagano where she will be safe. Naturally, being a man of honor, Goro promises to do that. What he doesn't realize, however, is that Mikimoto has become infuriated with him and, because of that, Goro's attempted journey with Aki becomes even more difficult from that point on. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this was an okay film which benefited from several interesting sub-plots and some solid acting by most of the actors concerned. Likewise, having two attractive actresses like Rika Fujie (as "Yuri Sagara") and the aforementioned Chikage Ogi certainly didn't hurt either. On the other hand, one particular weakness, in my opinion, was that the overall plot had too many similarities with the previous two films in the series. Along with that, some of the fight scenes seemed to go on much too long as well. Be that as it may, while I don't consider this to be as good as its two predecessors, it was sufficient for the time spent and I have rated it accordingly. Average.
