You don't need to know much more than the title to completely understand the movie Ninja Assassin. Spoiler alert! The movie is about a ninja who kills other ninjas. One might say that he assassinates them. If that doesn't sound interesting to you, stop reading now: this movie is not for you. If it does sound interesting, keep reading so I can tell you how Ninja Assassin fails to live up to its potential.
The titular assassin is a rogue ninja named Raizo (Rain – Speed Racer), who defected from his ninja clan after refusing to execute a runaway ninja trainee. He teams up with a Europol forensics researcher named Mika (Naomie Harris –28 Days Later, Pirates of the Carribean 2 and 3) after she starts following leads indicating that a series of political assassinations can be traced back to a similar shadowy organization that will guarantee the death of an individual for one hundred pounds of gold, or the cash equivalent of the same. The ninja clans catch on to Mika's investigation and try to shut her up, Raizo shows up to save her, and a lot of CGI gore gets splattered around in the ensuing bloodbath.
There are a lot of problems with the way the story is constructed. Despite a creepy opening that depicts a ninja assassinating a crime boss and his coterie, the plot falls flat once the focus moves on to our protagonists. The pace of the movie drags for the rest of the first hour, which cuts back and forth between Mika's investigation and flashbacks of Raizo growing up in his secret ninja dojo. Things pick up around the middle of the movie, when the plot is largely discarded for flashy, CGI enhanced action sequences and the movie runs into an entirely different set of problems.
You see, the action in the film is uninspired. It is flat. It is dull. Even with the excessive CGI enhancements of the film, the action fails to satisfy. With the fighting failing to provide excitement or appeal, the only draw for the movie is the over-the-top gore (if that floats your boat) and even that fails to live up to its potential as the copious amounts of CGI blood that is shed in the film is always obviously fake, and not in a fun, B-movie way.
It wouldn't be fair to completely disregard Ninja Assassin, as there are a few things that it does well. There are a couple of set piece battles that are really amazing, though it is always more for the set piece and less for the battle. It is also obvious that someone involved with the film had some impressive ideas for the composition of certain shots, as there are several instances where the unimpressive action is framed in a very interesting way. All in all, the movie looks very good on Blu-ray, and the few colorful action scenes looked great.
The special features are excellent, especially the featurette "The Myth and Legend of Ninjas" about the history and reality of the ninja, which has a couple of excellent geeky references to ninja appearances in popular culture, with my favorite references being a clip from Batman: The Animated Series and a couple of shots of the webcomic Dr. McNinja. The rest of the featurette is interesting as well, especially the discussion of how ninjutsu is taught today. The other special features include "The Extreme Sport of a Ninja" and "Training Rain", which document how their star, Rain, became a ninja for the film.
All in all, Ninja Assassin is a disappointment, especially given its lineage. It was cowritten by J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5), and produced by the Wachowski siblings (The Matrix), which makes Ninja Assassin's failure as an action movie even more of a mystery. While the Wachowskis aren't known for substance in their movies, they usually manage to make things entertaining. As for JMS, well, apparently he claimed in an interview to have written the movie in something like 50 hours.* So maybe that explains some things.
Maybe I've been going about this all wrong. Ninja are at their best when they are totally unseen, so it would follow that any action that the audience is able to discern from the shadows is inherently second-rate ninja action, explaining why the fight scenes in the movie seem so uninspired and, well, not fun. All the best fights are naturally invisible. That said, if the film managed to entertain you on the big screen, the Blu-ray edition of the film is the one to buy.
ComicsOnline.com gives Ninja Assassin 2.5 out of 5 throwing stars.
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