Review: Ninja Assassin
What do you get when you mix Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and the gory black and white scene from Kill Bill? Answer: an awesome movie called Ninja Assassin!
Epic.
Ninja Assassin offers high level violence (sweet), exaggerated ninjutsu martial arts (super sweet) and a vengeance theme (dolce) to deliver an enjoyable they-finally-made-the-movie-I-wanted-to-see flick.
It also has a decent thoughtful story. The film has two plotlines which eventually coincide for the ending. One takes place in the modern day following a Europol researcher and an agent investigating a series of related assassinations, and the other shows how the main character comes to be. Did I mention the main character was a ninja? Cool. Raizo, played by a newcomer from Korea named Rain, was raised in an isolated ninja temple. When his tragic relationship with a female student teaches him about heart, he learns that the ninja clan does not own him and that there is life outside of the ninja way. Before he can experience that life, he has to stop his ninja peers from killing him first.
The story rides shotgun to the fast paced ninja combat that gives the movie its wicked factor. Ninja stars are faster than bullets, their users are supernaturally powerful (but not in a comical way), and the battle between Raizo and his former clan leaned on epic.
There were one or two scenes when I was a bit drawn back. One example is when the ninja clan tries to catch Raizo by chasing him in the open across a busy street. Although it was night time, I have to believe that most of the drivers saw the group of ninjas running and fighting around them. There goes the ninja’s cloak of total secrecy, all of Berlin must have known about them after that. And the shaky-cam used in that same scene, sort of like the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan, made the action incomprehensible (I really hate shaky-cam). All of the other scenes had clear fighting except this one.
This was a pretty sweet movie if you like these sorts of films. If you are looking for the contemplative, poetic, tradition focused martial arts movie this is not it. Maybe you will like Red Cliff instead. The warrior ethos this movie taught was hard, painful and brutal. Raizo’s master was a tough sonovabitch.
The ending was my favourite part of the whole movie. Without ruining a great scene, all I will say is that it is the perfect analogy of West meets East. If anyone knows the history of Commodore Perry and his “Black Ships” against Japan in 1853, the ending scene very much reminisces that moment. Except beefed up with advanced weaponry.
I liked Ninja Assassin a great deal and will definitely buy it when it is released. I may even watch it again in theatres, though only to see that ending once more; a spectacular cinematic moment.
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