A ninja, played by Korean pop superstar Rain, assassinates someone in Ninja Assassin
Though it lacks their built-in nerd pedigree, like Drag Me to Hell and Inglourious Basterds earlier this year, Ninja Assassin is an exercise in old-school genre revivalism from its title to the bones of its gleefully daft narrative. And while director James McTeigue lacks the distinct vision or ambition of a Raimi or a Tarantino that would elevate Ninja Assassin to instant cult-classic status, he handles his gloriously pulpy material (provided here by Matthew Sand and comics superstar J. Micheal Straczynski) with affection, panache and a welcome disdain for reason. But when your movie is called Ninja Assassin, you best have left reason at home — possibly gagged and handcuffed to your radiator.
Ninja Assassin wears its love for movies like Shogun Assassin, Iron Monkey and Ninja Scroll proudly on its sleeve, though it's actually McTeigue's ability to seamlessly blend the conventions of different pulp genres that makes his film most interesting. The movie starts out — structurally, anyway — comfortably in the mould of an old supernatural horror film. The opening scene concerns a group of gangsters being creatively dismembered by something flitting in and out of the shadows, whereupon they spurt entirely too much cherry-red blood in all directions, scream, and then are dismembered even more. Only the creature in the shadows isn't a monster or a ghost: It's a ninja.
Shortly after the initial scene of just-winking-enough mayhem we meet Mika (Naomie Harris), a Europol researcher who believes that a network of ancient ninja assassins exists, and her superior officer Maslow (Ben Miles), who is skeptical. The two spout exposition and quips for a while, then Mika is saved from ninja assassination by Raizo (Korean pop superstar “Rain”), a rogue ninja assassin devoted to bringing down the ring of bad ninja assassins that Mika was right about all along.
Yes. Oh yes. Oh God yes.
While the opening half-hour is never boring, it does feel a little weighed down by a few too many atemporal scenes of Raizo's training, and McTeigue finds and maintains a nice “violence-tension-violence” pace around the time Raizo and Mika team up. It's at this point that the film falls into a more traditional action-revenge stride, though the horror film-inspired love of campy gore and nigh-invincible villains with a tendency to appear behind protagonists as they're facing the camera are agreeable constants. Barring some lovably unsubtle visual motifs, the film's only real depth comes from the (likely unintentional) double meaning of its title: There are ninjas who perform and are eliminated via a process that might be charitably defined as assassination.
By ninjas.
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