Arriving home one evening with his wife, Yoko (DEATH OF HONOR's Yumi Takigawa), elderly steel mill owner Toyama (the great Ken Ogata) finds that his home has been invaded by Goseikai yakuza lieutenant Aihara (Toshiyuki Nagashima) and his thugs. Behind on his payments to them, Toyama can only watch helplessly as Yoko is gang raped. Unable to deal with the humiliation, the woman later hangs herself. Forging himself a sword, Toyama proceeds to kill several of the men but is unable to learn the whereabouts of Aihara. Meanwhile, at the jewellery shop where Toyama and Yoko had been shopping the night before, a robbery is in progress. The bandits are foiled but, surprisingly enough, the women who do it grab the criminals' ski masks and make off with the loot themselves. Toyama arrives on the scene just after the fact and recognizes one of the foiled men as an associate of Aihara. While on his way to finish off the rest of his targets, Toyama inadvertently learns of where the women are splitting up the loot, and heads there, but the Goseikai soon crash the party.

For the follow-up to his 1995 hit, writer/director Takashi Ishii switches "the five" from men to women (Yo Kimiko, Mai Kitajima, Yui Natsukawa, Yumi Nishiyama, and Shinobu Otake) and, while the characters are perhaps not as indelible, the actresses are effective and we do grow more interested in their backgrounds as the movie progresses. The group's changing allegiances and the ever-shifting storyline (which, like the original, seems deceptively simple at first) keep one guessing, while Ishii dazzles us with exceptional imagery, ranging from shocking (the expected genre carnage) to poetic (a midnight swim in a spacious pool) to amusingly crass (a none-too-subtle John Woo homage with pigeons instead of doves). The director's years in manga are evident once again, with the characters periodically spread out in some wonderfully cluttered, panel-like compositions, and the de rigueur nudity is also right out of this world (one of the heroines brutally dispatches her captor and then showers the blood off her naked body using a handy kitchen sink attachment). The intensity of the first film is not always present here but GONIN 2's style and verve allow it to emerge as a worthy follow-up.