The 2013 Chinese film Switch has some pretty good zako content as well, as the villain has a squad of dancer ninjas called the "Twelve Constellation Girls" that show up throughout the film, though the best is the final fight scene starting at 1:42:33 where the main heroine murders the whole lot of them in elegant fashion. As is typical for this fandom, the rest of the film makes absolutely zero sense and is basically unwatchable despite the fact that, for once, zako were prominently featured in a film that clearly had a huge budget, and the lavish sets, costumes, and fight choreography can't make up for the fact that you can't follow what's going on half the time.
As for the actual zako scenes, starting at 22:05 the girls show up on a boat dressed in swan lake style costumes, and proceed to beat the crap out of a bunch of random security guards in high kicking, dance battle fashion, which clearly establishes them as deadly fighters. The following scene is great too, with their boss admonishing them for their failure by killing a bird in front of them, showing that they are expendable and worthless to him, so we're off to a pretty strong start here. They next show up at 34:41 as waitresses on rollerblades with actual blades on them which they use to murder some more random dudes. At 37:20 the hero is infiltrating the bad guy's base and the girls are now dressed in geisha costumes and flying around on silk ribbons. He stabs one of them, realizes it was actually the main girl of the film, and freaks out, after which the remaining girls surround him and stab and kick him repeatedly. Of course none of this really matters, since stab wounds evidently don't count in this universe.
In the final fight, the main character's wife, who apparently doesn't mind that he's been cheating on her this whole movie, shows up to take on the bad girls so that he can go after the boss. While it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that she as some random insurance agent can pretty effortlessly handle a whole team of trained and armed assassins, I don't mind that so much here because the movie makes no sense anyway and having an ordinary woman take out a bunch of supposedly deadly henchgirls with ease is a staple of the genre. Their outfits in the final battle also really work for me, combining white jackets, grey tights, and heels with fancy hairpieces and tulle skirts, mixing the all-business look and dance aesthetic and contrasting well with the simple outfit the heroine wears. A particular highlight is the sequence at 1:44:14, where a poor zako just gets absolutely demolished and I'm here for all of it. The scene ends with a sword fight between the bad guy's right hand woman and the former head zako turned good girl, who's obviously being doubled by a stuntwoman here, where both end up dying.
The thing that irks me is that this movie didn't have to suck. It features a ton of gorgeous women with seemingly unlimited costume changes, but evidently doesn't know what to do with them. The zako are in plenty of scenes but mostly are just there to look pretty, having only a few brief moments to shine in an over two hour long film. I can't tell you how many times I skipped through watching just the zako scenes before finally biting the bullet and watching the whole movie to get some context, only to find out there basically wasn't any. Too bad that it wasn't more successful, otherwise we might have gotten more zako content in mainstream, big budget movies.
Which scene was this one from? I couldn't find it
