Review: Ninja Assassin

bill bodkin reviews the cinematic bloodbath …

“If you want blood … YOU GOT IT!”

This exclamation by AC/DC lead singer Brian Johnson perfectly summarizes the film Ninja Assassin.

Ninja Assassin is one of the bloodiest movies I’ve ever seen. It makes 300 look like A Night At The Museum. But all the blood, guts and action cannot make up for the lack of fun that this film should’ve had.

The entire tone of Ninja Assassin is as unnecessarily serious as its lead character Raizo (Rain). Sure, the guy can kill everyone and their mother (and minus the mother part, he kills more than 200 people), but he is boring as a bag of hammers. You cannot get into this guy as a sympathetic hero. Okay, his ninja clan killed his girlfriend (he did nothing to stop it) and they left him for dead (he was a jerk to them), but after that, not much is going for him. If the writers had taken a little more than the 53 hours it took them to re-write the entire script and made this guy even a little bit interesting, the film would’ve been so much better.

Getting back to the tone, Ninja Assassin is as serious as a stuffy British period film. All the action is a little too slick, the body and dismemberment a little too well-produced. It’s a little too cold and calculating for its own good. The ridiculous amount of violence and action should’ve inspired a bit of fun, like the rock ‘n’ roll action flicks Robert Rodriguez directs. Sure, they’re violent films, but they still have an air of excitement, chaos and a little rough-around-the-edges quality. If we want to compare it to the lead character again, the film, unlike it’s often shirtless hero, is way too buttoned up.

Now don’t get me wrong — the film is visually entertaining in terms of the action sequences and special effects. The fight choreography and the innovative ways the two million people die in this film (only five are assassinated) make it unique within the martial arts genre. This is due to the film’s producers, the Wachowski Brothers and Joel Silver, whom all know how to turn the action up to 11 in any film.

But the Wachowskis’ involvement and, more importantly, director James McTeague’s (a Wachowski disciple) involvement adds another element of disappointment. McTeague directed V For Vendetta, one of my all-time favorite movies. It’s a wonderfully written, politically charged film that had a small explosion of violence in it. Ninja Assassin seems to take V‘s small explosion (they’re stylized very similarly) and makes an movie out of it, forgetting an interesting plot. Maybe I was expecting more from McTeague this time around.

In the end, Ninja Assassin is a film that I would recommend avoiding in theaters and picking up on Netflix or your local video store. It will look very pretty on high definition TV, and if you keep low expectations going into it, you will be entertained.