Review: Ninja Assassin
Filed under: Action, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews
By: William Goss, reprinted from Fantastic Fest '09
One can't ask too much of a film called Ninja Assassin -- that's a given -- but James McTeigue's proper directorial follow-up to V for Vendetta does its damnedest to take that insta-pulp title and weave around it a worn-out tale of forbidden love, family betrayal, and government conspiracy. Complete with some hard-to-see fight scenes and some harder-to-hear dialogue, all delivered with a poker-straight face and capped off with some super-splattery kills, it's like a graphic novel adaptation with comic book punctuation, a film so flagrant in its fakery that it almost forgets to have any fun.
Raizo (Korean pop star Rain, of Speed Racer and "Colbert Report" fame) was once an orphan, raised by a secretive clan to, um, assassinate as, well, a ninja would. One forbidden fling and one shamed father later, and our pariah protagonist is off to Berlin in order to save Europol* agent Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris) from the grisly fate that her criminal investigations have inevitably drawn.
To its credit, Assassin doesn't skimp on its action sequences, but what's there is a flurry of fury at best, cluttered with the exaggerated motions of swinging swords and throwing star after throwing star, and then cut up to undermine the genuine physical efforts of its lead and countless stuntmen at every turn. Two night fights early on are near indecipherable in execution, while a mid-point slo-mo slice-and-dice shot seems lifted wholesale from Warner Brothers' own 300. Worse yet, each kill is then accompanied by a garish burst of computer-generated bloodshed, a novelty that wears out its welcome from the prologue on and renders each subsequent death scene as unremarkable and unexciting as the last.
And each video game has its share of cut-scenes, we're treated to the cheesiest dialogue uttered by a uniformly wooden ensemble in between melees. As the eponymous soldier of stealth, Rain only fares best because he has less to say than this review does and is often shirtless demonstrates a viable physicality that goes otherwise obscured during the chopped-up, blur-happy battles. Harris plays panicked on cue, and McTeigue vet Ben Miles (Racer, Vendetta) plays her boss/boyfriend with a perfectly adequate sense of skepticism. None, though, can manage to make the plodding plotting seem particularly urgent or critical in the greater scheme of things, and none can justify the handy mysticism that creeps in enough to make literal shadows out of assailants and heal any wound at any time.
All of the back story in the world can't make us care about what made a ninja assassin just that, though, similar to how all of the whooshing sounds can't help us grasp just who is sparring with who when the chit-chat does subside, and all of those flying fluids can't disguise the fact that Ninja Assassin is a thoroughly bloodless experience.
*That's right, it's not even Interpol. Hell, the film should just take place in Schmerlin.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-25-2009 @ 6:25PM
John Muth said...
Just wanted to comment that Europol is a real organization, that covers most of the European continent.
And for the blurry, incomprehensible fighting shown in the movie, I actually felt that it made more sense that ninjas would in fact fight from the shadows - and I loved the way that they seemed to materialize (which I think want meant to mean, they actually were, not just seeming like) out of dark areas, and especially loved the fight scene in Mika's apartment where she's trying to follow them with the flashlight. In fact, in the one moment where we see the ninjas in light, I thought that it was pretty silly. Especially when all of the ninjas are running down a street fighting in between traffic. Just seemed like they kind of blew their stealthiness.
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11-26-2009 @ 4:43PM
William Goss said...
Okay, that one's my bad. I was fairly sure that I checked to see before I wrote about it at Fantastic Fest, but the slightest Google search now reveals the error of my ways.
Apologies.
11-26-2009 @ 3:18PM
joits said...
the only real motivation for anyone to see this is the martial arts, not the story or acting. but to read and hear about the filming style making it hard to even see any martial arts being done was the killer for me. i mean if you can't do that right, why even bother hiring real martial artists or training any of the actors.
i always thought it was pointless in the two sequels of the bourne identity to have matt damon do any martial arts because you couldn't see anything!
they really should just hire an asian camera man and editor and have them do the fight scenes because its completely opposite in asia when they do it... that is long cuts where you can actually SEE the martial arts. american directors seem to think that the "strap a camera to a rabid dog" style of filming makes the action more exciting... even some of the best films are guilty of this... batman begins anyone?
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11-27-2009 @ 3:11PM
Looney said...
i always agree with reviews here, but.. although not the best movie, i thought it was decent, maybe its because of the slew of bad movies being made recently this comes out as one of the better ones, the story itself was not a bad story, i think what brought it down was the bad acting, and the lack of visual fighting, but yet still interested me, so for once, i disgree with this review, if you dont go to the movies to see this, then i doubt you EVER go to the movies, i mean, if you go in expecting too much you will ALWAYS be let down. this movie was decent etertainment, dont forget this is Hollywood we are talking about.
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11-28-2009 @ 3:52AM
Robert said...
Re-view the preview: Ninja Assassin never purported to be anything other than a feature-length fight scene. The plot--a shallow vengeance plot indicative of most martial arts films--serves as little more than a producers' excuse to showcase Rain. At no point did the filmmakers claim to pursue anything but. Thus, the film succeeds admirably. In all honesty, if you were expecting anything beyond the claims made by the preview, then you've wasted your time by over-thinking the film. It is precisely what it claimed to be, and nothing more. And that, to me, is worth ten dollars.
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12-05-2009 @ 9:40AM
observer said...
i just saw the movie this afternoon. although i have some questionable scenes, i still walked out the theater happy with the movie. for me, the action scenes were matrix-like and the story is also fine with me. well, critics are critics. which means all movies have flaws, because that's what they only see. they don't enjoy any movie at all.
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12-07-2009 @ 4:47PM
adele said...
Watch it online here: http://free-movies-on-line.com/
http://movies-land.net/
http://watch-movie-online-free.com/
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