Obviously the first thing that struck me about Ninja Assassin was that ridiculous title. Maybe it’s just because to this day I still associate ninjas with turtles, but from the moment I saw the name of this movie I was expecting some cheesy, direct to DVD martial arts nonsense. It’s not a great film, but it’s a hell of a lot better than I expected. It’s categorized in the brand of ultra-violence that is so gory and extreme that it becomes the central spectacle of the whole show that’s on everyone’s lips on the way out of the theater. The opening sequence is one of the most surprisingly bloody scenes I’ve seen in a movie since the fountains of blood in Kill Bill, so needless to say, Tarantino fans are almost sure to have a good time.
But still, even for the good ones, expectations are generally low for fighting movies. There is just such a small range of plot possibilities in movies whose target audiences expect to spend half the running time watching guys punching and kicking each other, which is why so many martial arts movies have such short shelf lives. The gimmick in Ninja Assassin is the way the central characters – abducted children abducted forced into the Ozunu clan and trained into an ancient tradition of assassins – have so thoroughly mastered the art of invisibility that during the majority of the fight scenes we can’t even see them. They’re hidden in the shadows as their mysterious weapons that separate victims into two halves like a machete through an apple. One poor sucker in the opening scene is offed in such a spectacular way that it will almost shock you out of your seat, or at least surprise you into watching more.
So children are abducted and forced into this secretive clan of ninjas, who can then be hired for the 1,000-year-old price of 100 pounds of gold to perform surgical and, ahem, thoroughly effective assassinations of whomever might be rubbing you the wrong way. Raizo, the central character, has been mentally reprogrammed along with the rest of his clanmates until a pretty girl lets him listen to her heart, showing him for the first time that there’s actually one in there. She then escapes and is soon killed for her efforts before his very eyes.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, a Europol researcher named Mika (Naomie Harris) has been sniffing around and has found numerous suspicious transactions, coincidentally totaling up to the exact monetary value of 100 pounds of gold, and she begins to suspect that there is an actual clan of ninjas performing the assassinations that have been showing up in the news lately. After leaving the clan, Raiko begins to seek revenge on the clan’s ruthless leader, Ozunu, while at the same time preventing his henchmen from killing her for all that pesky sniffing around she’s been doing.
Your mission, should you choose to avoid instant death by accepting it...
As far as the action, there’s plenty of it and, as the MPAA generously informs us, it’s not just violence but stylized violence, which means it’s in slow motion and with ninjas doing invisible backflips just outside the frame and whatnot. South Korean pop star Rain delivers an outstanding and thankfully subdued performance in a role that would have instantly crumpled under the slightest bit of overacting. Harris, on the other hand, enters the movie sounding like an over-eager intern, and ultimately raising not much higher than Rae Dawn Chong’s performance as the black girl in Commando. Meanwhile, director James McTeigue (who also brought us V For Vendetta and did second unit directing work on all of the Matrix films) keeps us in the dark for the fight scenes and lights everything up during the scenes where Raiko is beginning to see the light. I will say that I left with the feeling that there were two movies to be found somewhere in all that blood-spatter: one with more extremeness in the bloodletting department, and one with more of the swiftness and silence. Either way, there are certainly a lot of ninja stars in the movie, and they’re totally awesome. I didn’t think I was ever gonna see that again!
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