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Ninja, please!
Director: James McTeigue
Time: 1 hour 33 minutes
Genre: Action
Featuring: Rain, Naomi Harris
Once in a while, an action movie comes out that walks the border of creativity and provides the viewers with an unexpected experience that builds awareness and passion towards a innovative theme. "Ninja Assassin" is not one of those movies. Instead, the ninja action flick by first time head director James McTeigue is 99 minutes of senseless blood, dismemberment and gunfire -- which is not too bad if that's what you expect out of action movie. Oh, did I mention that it also has the most mysterious assassin group of all time, ninjas!?
The movie revolves around the life of Raizo (played by Korean megastar Rain), who has disassociated himself from the Izuno ninja clan that has groomed him from an early age to become the killing machine that he is today. Raizo teams up with an INTERPOL agent (Naomi Harris) to take down the Izuno clan. In between these two events the movie is scattered with flashbacks of Raizo's upbringing as an assassin and there are a handful of fights between Raizo and his former ninja brethren.
And that is the entire movie. There are no plot twists -- no underlying themes about the injustices of being bred to be a ninja -- in fact this movie might be better if it had no dialogue at all. The script has no substance whatsoever.
What "Ninja Assassin" does have a lot of though, is blood and violence. It seems as if to make up for its plot and script shortcomings, James McTeigue decided to make every fight scene in the movie over the top. A person loses a limb or his body is split in half in every scene of this film. Whether it be a gangster losing his arm or a ninja losing his lower torso, someone is getting dismembered every 5 minutes. Additionally, every cut or injury provides a gratuitous amount of unrealistic blood. For viewers looking for a simple hour and a half of chuckles and dead pan humor, "Ninja Assassin" might be right for you.
Ultimately, "Ninja Assassin" just doesn't make the cut. (How do you make a movie about ninjas suck?) I'm not exactly familiar with the protocols to be a ninja, but I am pretty sure that they cannot throw ninja stars through wooden structural columns and that they cannot heal large bodily gashes by doing a series of Naruto-like hand signals. (But its an action movie so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt here.) At the end of the day, there is too little depth, even for an action movie to make this film comprehensible and worth the price of admission.
2 out of 5 stars