Ninja Assassin (2009) - Movie review
Release Date: November 25, 2009
Genre: Action
Director: James McTeigue
Writer: Matthew Sand, J. Michael Straczynski
Cast: Rain, Naomie Harris, Ben Miles, Sho Kosugi, Rick Yune
Studio: Warner Brothers
Official site: ninja-assassin-movie.warnerbros.com
Running Time: 99 minutes
MPAA Rating: Rated R for strong bloody stylized violence throughout, and language.
When the film opened on the cushy den of a Chinese crime gang, I was worried. Our first sight is of an uncouth Chinese gangster, getting a tattoo of a dragon. All around him drip the gaudy trimmings of a gangster lair — an update on the opium den, as seen through the orientalist eyes of a Western director. The gang’s honchos wait on low benches of plushy, silky pillows; they flash gold handguns (don’t Chinese people love gold?!), and a pretty lady sips champagne, casting a bored eye over the scene.
Then, the leader receives an envelope of black sand. What happens next?
Why the Ninjas storm in! Thank goodness there’s no ration on fake blood because these guys chop and hack away, severing limbs like they’re bread loaves, killing everyone in sight and saving the movie from a flashy, ludicrous vision of Asian criminals and replacing it with a more romantic stereotype: the ancient Ninja, whose street cred lies in his adherence to tradition and his disapproval of speeding bullets and CGI.
There hasn’t been a full-blown, high-budget Ninja feature film in a while — the genre’s been on a downswing as of late. So when the Wachowski brothers (the duo behind The Matrix and V for Vendetta) jumped on the script and cast Rain, king of K-Pop, Kung Fu Cinema called it a “move with the potential to single-handedly revive the ninja genre.”
And oh, it will.
Rain, prepared for battle. Photo Credit: Warner Brothers
Not only for the film’s edge-of-your seat, uber-violent fight scenes, but for the beauty of the thing: Ninjas-in-training fight in the dark among suspended balls of fire in a high-up, walled mountain lair…And let’s not forget the beauty of our star, Rain, who for this picture went from an adorable bubblegum pop-star to a chiseled leading man who can squeeze grapes in the ridges of his new six-pack. Plus, the acting isn’t half bad. Rain doesn’t have many lines–but he does a fine, steady job delivering them. And leading lady Naomie Harris is friggin’ great.
The film follows the story of the Ozunu, an ancient Ninja clan that for centuries have been assassinating world leaders in exchange for 100 bars of gold, which they presumably use to keep their high-up, mountain fort well-stocked. To thicken their ranks, the Ozunu take in Japanese orphans and put them through the rounds. We see a young Raizo (Rain’s character, played as a teenager by Joon Lee) endure relentless, painful ninja training — to name just one form of torture, he learns the art of learning to walk silently on wooden floorboards by getting his feet slashed whenever he makes a squeak. The leading trainer is Sho Kosugi, legendary Hollywood Ninja of 1981’s Enter the Ninja, and it’s a delight to see him go through the rounds — training another generation both of wannabe Ninjas and Ninja-movie fans. The young Raizo develops a romantic relationship with a girl Ninja (ACTOR’S NAME, kicking ass)…but when she attempts to run away and is brought back and mutilated, he loses his faith in his trainers.
Love interest Mika in the useless Europol compound. Photo Credit: Warner Brothers
The film then breaks from romantic, smoky training compound to show us Berlin today — a city of car-honks and halogen lighting — where “Europol” (think Interpol) operative Mika is investigating the connections between a series of unsolved assassinations. In a sequence of smarty-pants moves she traces bank withdrawals back to the Ozunu, and then the fun begins.
Ninjas, she learns, only attack in the dark, slipping out from the shadows (that’s what makes them NINJAS!)… so when we see her coming home to her apartment to find the power’s just gone off and decide to enter anyway with just some dinky mag-lite, our hearts jump into our throats as if this were some kind of horror film. The filmmakers use light and shadow (and our fear of the dark) to great effect, and it’s splendidly inventive to see a fight between two-warring ninjas illuminated by only her flashlight. What she’s watching is the ninja sent to assassinate her fighting one that has come to protect her.
Rain, battling in the smoky-hot smoke. Photo Credit: Warner Brothers
That protector is, of course, Raizo/Rain. And why is he protecting her? He’s broken free from the gang and wants someone to uncover their dark history. She follows his tips — how to mask her scent, where to drive — and working together they attempt to elude both the Ninja gang and Europol, which, of course, doesn’t like the idea of one of their own going off with a proven assassin.
The film plays the typical cards of an action film — lots of high-speed chase scenes and darting kisses in the rain — but remains playful and light. And it’s nice to see an action movie about analog violence (with swords and punches!) en lieu of machine guns. Still, basically every scene shows Rain encircled by his former classmates as he fights them off one-by-one, which begs one still wonders — the five-hundredth action film later — why they can’t all just pounce on him at once.
But realism isn’t the point here.The film is aware of its ridiculous goriness. A scene of a woman’s head rolling around in a laundromat washing machine, oozing blood all over the white tiled floor, cuts straight to the splat of ketchup on an Europol operative’s fries. It’s a Quentin-Tarantino-esque vision of Hong Kong kung fu–an action pic that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Europol’s heat-vision camera is useless at detecting the Ninjas. All it shows is one of its own getting squeezed by a long metal chain, and the blood oozing out a bright, hot red. Best line? Of the captured Rain, an agent says: “He doesn’t look like a killing machine to me. He looks like he’s in a boy band.”
