Review: Ninja Assassin (2009)

[Tim Skirvin]

  Seeing movies on Sunday nights is generally a solitary thing.  Sure,
there's a few people in the audience with me, others that were looking to
kill some downtime and see a movie without a huge crowd.  This takes
something away from comedies, as hearing when the rest of the world laughs
is often as fun as the movie.  But for action movies, dramas, and so forth,
it's generally ideal.  But every now and then, I run into an outlier, where
*more* people show up than usual.  I can never predict these times;
certainly, I never would have predicted that people would come out in
droves on a Sunday night to see a mediocre martial arts/ninja movie with an
exceptional amount of gore.

  I suppose that, by at least one measure, the movie fulfilled its
goal: there were, indeed, ninjas, and they did, indeed, assassinate.  In
fact, the opening scene not only offered us those two concepts, it did so
with style.  If the rest of the movie had been as well-made, I would have
been *very* happy; but there also wouldn't have been a plot, or characters,
or actors from _Coupling_.  And I suppose that would have been something of
a loss.

  Instead, we got a perplexing movie.  The action scenes were clearly
meant to be exciting set-pieces, and they were indeed pretty and exciting
to watch; but they were also difficult to actually understand, to the point
of incomprehensibility.  The background was supposed to be detailed and
tragic; but it turned out to be poorly balanced, with an odd combination of
too-dramatic and understated.  And the plot attempted to be both paper-thin
and over-wrought, but managed to be...  well, really not bad for something
like this.  When it comes down to it, I can't really tell how good of a film
the creators were aiming for.  And that's a bit weird.

  As for the movie itself...  well, I didn't hate it.  Rain did a fine
job in the lead role, I guess.  The archetypical fights were fun.  Those few
fights that actually involved person-on-person martial arts battles,
instead of just cutting people's heads off, were kindof interesting.  And
the training-to-be-a-ninja stuff was at least thought-provoking, even if it
wasn't in the way that the creators were pushing for.  

  But I still would have liked something that had been polished.  Give
the fighting scenes a purpose beyond arterial spray; give a reasonable
sense of scale of the ongoing war; revel more in the silly; and maybe all
of the ninja trainees should actually be doing the same testing.  Instead,
we came up with something adequate, but not very good.

  **

  One random note: JMS, the creator of Babylon 5 (my favorite TV
series), was the co-writer of this movie.  It did shine through, but perhaps
not in a great way.  If you've watched the show or read his comics, some of
the speeches will sound a little familiar.  *shrug* That's not really a big
problem, just worthy of observation.

                           - Tim Skirvin (tskirvin at killfile.org)
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