Review: Ninja Assassin

Slice-and-dice cinema goes for the kill but misses every main artery.

Its been a long time since ninjas at this level have graced the silver screens – ninja turtles notwithstanding – and it was a genre that mixed action with mystery, suspense and even horror. Ninja Assassin does its best to incorporate all these factors, but not to a satisfactory enough level to make it work.

Korean pop-star Rain plays Raizo, an orphan who has been raised by Shô Kosusgi (star of all the cool ninja movies in the 1980′s) to be a ninja that will be hired for 100 pounds of gold to governments around the world. Wow, great premise and bringing the ninja into to the 21st century. Through flashbacks we see how Raizo was trained to be a ninja in what turned out to be the better half of the film.

The first 5 minutes of the film gave us such hope and promise for a brutal and gory ninja movie that would take the shadow warriors to the same cinematic and special effects level like 300 took Spartan warriors.

We soooooo wanted to love this movie, but even with the guidance of the brothers behind The Matrix, Ninja Assassin falls on its own blade.

For what is essentially a “popcorn movie” – meaning just a fun way to spend 2-hours – Ninja Assassin is bogged down in the second half by cliches, plotholes and times that make you want to scream at the screen because of the insanity that shows up. For all this we wonder why they didn’t get the rights for a live-action version of Ninja Scroll, Blade of the Immortal or Kamui – all fantastically well written manga and anime with lots of slice and dice.

Director James McTeigue‘s debut was V for Vendetta definitely not a perfect film but one that had at least a fairly interesting storyline (which of course is due to it being an original comic book series by the famed writer Alan Moore).

With the budget under US$50 million, and no major stars we were hoping the Wachowski Brothers would take this opportunity to take some risks with the storytelling. Since this kind of movie is going to appeal to a very niche market and that any hokiness would fail to appeal to that market. When the first head gets decapitated this is going to subtract alot of the female audience anyways, so why the story continues to pursue that audience instead of staying with the audience who loves to see this kind of action is a mystery to us.

And don’t get us started on the idea that the most infamous ninja clan somehow manages to take their fight into the city streets and lets a massive onslaught of Europol agents with tanks and firepower to sneak up on them. On a secluded mountain, nonetheless!

Rain tries to prove he can take some of his pop-star powers to the big screen, even with a line of dialogue poking fun of his singing roots, there isn’t a lot for anyone to do in a movie about ninjas what with all the silent killing and all.

Its great that the nod to casting Shô Kosugi as the ninja master training the orphans, and that James Bond villain Rick Yune makes an appearance as the “evil brother” but the real star of Ninja Assassin is the blood.

With each slice, blood splurts out like you’ve never seen it before, the Wachowski’s obviously loved Ichi the Killer and have tried to bring a lot of that “slice and dice cinema” to the masses. I guess when writer J. Michael Straczynski was brought in to give the script a polish 52 hours before shooting was to begin that pretty much gives you an idea on how much story meant to the Wahcowski’s on this one.

Ninja Assassin retains its 1980′s B-movie roots perfectly, its probably the best B-movie ever made, we were just hoping for a lot more.

Ninja Assassin opens today in Hong Kong.