Where to begin with this movie? This review is going to be a little shorter than most others, mostly because this film is baffling in its ridiculousness. It makes it hard to say a lot about it. I think it is only fair to lead in with an introduction of what, if anything, a “ninja” is, because the makers of Ninja Assassin had absolutely no idea!
The ninja were a class of people who are known to exist since the 14th century. Their main role was in times of war to carry out the dishonorable tasks that the samurai would not such as spying, sabotage, and assassination. During the Sengoku Period they reached the height of their power, but after the Tokugawas unified Japan their usefulness waned and they mostly disappear from history. After this point many assassinations were blamed on ninja and through retelling their exploits became mythical leading to many of the depictions of ninja in our modern society. The mystical skills of the ninja, ninjitsu, are far less based on martial arts than most would expect, including, spiritual refinement, water training, horsemanship, meteorology, and geology as well as weapons training.
So what is Ninja Assassin? This film is a gory action flick about a rogue ninja who is trying to take revenge on the ninja family that trained him. This is about all there is to it with a lot of unimportant side stories. But the real question is why, and the answer is about the silliest I have ever heard. According to the Wachowski brothers, when filming Speed Racer, Rain, the Korean pop star’s performance in the ninja scene made them want to have Rain star in his own ninja related movie. From the very beginning this does not bode well. From its very conception the only idea the creators had was, “Rain being a ninja”. Already you can tell we don’t have a lot to work with.
Director James McTeigue has a long history with directorial work in the form of assistant and second unit director with the Wachowski brothers. This is one of four films he was actually in charge of. According to McTeigue his influences for this film included The Getaway, Badlands, Panic in the Streets, Ninja Scroll, and Samurai Champloo. This makes my job easy and hard at the same time. On the one hand he has just told us what he was thinking when he made the film, so why should I write about this or do any research? On the other hand, I don’t believe his claim at all. I have watched all of these, and accept for Samurai Champloo I don’t see influences from any of these films. I suppose you can make the case that in Panic in the Streets there is a health inspector claiming that there is an impending plague of Pneumatic Plague sort of like how the Europol agent is claiming that there is a vast underworld network of ninjas, but that’s about it. Oh and that two of his sources have ninjas in them.
I can half way understand the Ninja Scroll reference. This is an animated film where the ninja character Jubei must fight several assassins all with special powers. The ninja character can slip into flat shadows to evade his opponent and this was probably the coolest thing Ninja Assassin did, having ninjas come out of shadows that were obviously too small for them to really hide in. For all the criticisms of this movie that I have I am proud of it for not giving too many superpowers to the ninjas. True, they are a little ridiculously over powered and have the shadow hiding skill but otherwise it’s just a martial arts movie.
This is a case where I don’t believe the director really had any idea what he was doing other than making an action movie. What really astounded me was that from very early in the film, it was obvious to me that there were serious Terminator parallels all through the movie, but the director did not site these. Party 1, a woman, is pursued by Party 2, but only because he is protecting her from Party 3. Parties 1 and 2 flee with intermittent flashbacks about Party 2’s past. Parties 1 and 2 are picked up by the authorities holding Party 2 as a criminal and acknowledging Party 1 as innocent. Then the authorities are torn to pieces by a Party 3 attack. I have just described Terminator from the beginning to the police station shootout and probably the first hour of Ninja Assassin.
There really wasn’t much of a theme to speak of other than revenge. You might think that there was a killing people is wrong moral but the main character kills boatloads of people so ok… All of his motivation revolves around his friend/sister/girlfriend? Getting killed for trying to run away from the ninja school and yeah, that’s about all there is to his character.
This film follows in a long line of unsuccessful martial arts movies that rely heavily on computer graphics. I blame The One for starting this. One of the draws of a martial arts movie is to watch the martial artist prance around in the most amazing way possible. That he or she is actually performing the feats on the screen is what is impressive. Jackie Chan hit upon this by insisting on always performing his own stunts. The One was a sci-fi movie about inter-dimensional travel between parallel universes where you could kill your counterpart and gain their power, sort of like Highlander. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say any of the staff on this movie were thinking about The One, it set up a market for this kind of sloppy martial arts knock off films.
More to blame is The Matrix and the Wachowski brothers' wild success with the franchise. Both are fans of anime which involves many unreal fight scenes and modified physics. The transference of anime into live action was explored in their Matrix movies with varying results. By the end of Matrix Revolutions they had full CG fight sequences that looked more like Dragon Ball Z than any previous martial arts films. This has little to do with the movie itself and more of a style choice made by the Wachowski brothers. Their Speed Racer film is another example of their attempts to accurately transfer animated source material into the realm of live action. Ninja Assassin is heavily laden with over the top action sequences and gun fights both of which are better suited in an animated medium. There are several sequences in the movie where the action is not shown, like Rain stuffing another ninja into a washing machine, because the physical action of how to accomplish this has even escaped the film makers.
As for the actual portrayal of ninjas, being the brain child of the Wachowski brothers, or at least requiring their approval, their interest in anime hurts the accuracy in ninja portrayals. Much like being a sniper, the life of a ninja is the art of waiting and not being seen. To make a movie about a good ninja wouldn’t be very interesting since you wouldn’t be able to see him. Instead they lean to the opposite end of the spectrum and these ninjas have more of a Naruto feel with as much flair and collateral damage as possible.
This is a very silly movie with lots of jaw dropping astoundment moments. The story is incredibly bland as we have seen it many times before and the characters are very one dimensional. This film is clearly another experimental/pet project of the Wachowskis and is not much more than a bloody action movie with bad acting. A final note, Ninja Assassin was not shown in 3D yet it came out at the height of the most recent 3D craze and features several scenes where weapons and debris appear to be flying out of the screen. This looks to me as if they originally intended it to be shown in 3D but ran out of money. This film has made about $61 million worldwide on a $40 million budget.
Movies Referenced:
2009-Ninja Assassin
2008-Speed Racer
2003-The Matrix Revolutions
2001-The One
1998- The Matrix
1993-Ninja Scroll
1986-Highlander
1984-Terminator
1973-Badlands
1972-The Getaway
1950-Panic in the Streets
