Review: Ninja Assassin

[keevacaereni]

God this was bad.

So, first off, I knew this was going to be a bad film, but I was hoping for GI Joe levels of badness (read: AWESOME). The first ten minutes disabused me of that notion. I still feel bad for that tattooist, he didn't do anything except have his heart be on the wrong side, he didn't deserve to die. The main plot is that there's these clans of ninja pimping themselves out as assassins to governments and kings and basically anyone rich enough. The hero is a ninja gone rogue after the execution of his love interest by his clan, for trying to get out. Then Europol gets involved, I don't know why.

The fights were crap, frankly. The CGI blood spurted liberally, but you didn't care, except to grimace at the violence. It was like the Burly Brawl in The Matrix Reloaded, the whole thing felt like a video game. The best fight was at the end, between the hero, Raizo, and his ninja mentor, but naturally, that was pretty much in darkness. Nice job, guys. The GI Joe fight scenes were better, because at least there were actually two guys beating each other up, it wasn't CG masquerading as a martial arts fight.

The actors in this film cannot act, by the way. I don't think it's their fault though, because the plot holes are seriously everywhere. As wonderm said, it'd be night outside and ten minutes later it's morning. And the main guy is apparently a ninja gone rogue because he didn't want to kill for no reason, yet he's still working as an assassin, as far as I could tell. He's also got some kind of network telling him how to find the heroine. Who is that lady calling him? Who sent the kids with the envelope? Why did his landlady show up at all? We never find out.

The heroine is basically useless, funnily enough. You could have cut her out completely and it wouldn't have made a difference. The ninja were after the hero anyway, we didn't need Ms Exposition to be tracked by them too. She works for Europol as a forensic investigator, and basically does bugger all to advance the plot. She was, however, born with her heart on the wrong side of her chest, just like the guy at the beginning of the film! Must be pretty common.

There's a ninja guy who seems like he's supposed to be some kind of rival, but we never really see them interact, he just kills the love interest in flashbacks and calls Raizo "little brother" a lot. Most of the supporting characters are kind of flat, really. There is no character development in this film.

The whole Europol thing was just confusing, I still don't know why they were after Raizo, instead of, oh, I don't know, the CLAN OF NINJA out to kill one of your employees. And where did they get an army from in the final battle? Were they the Japanese army? It didn't look like they were in Japan anyway, more like Nepal, but whatever.

Some of the flashbacks were pretty cool, and I must admit I squeed when I saw one of the kids do a jitsu throw, but overall, this film was just boring. I found certain bits funny, like the fountains of blood coming out of peoples' stumps like in Kill Bill, but mostly the violence was just grotesque.

In short, confusing plot, rubbish fight scenes, awful characters, and way, way too much blood.



This is the perfect film to showcase my new sliding scale of so bad it's good films: The SE meter! Based on the awesome that was GI Joe the movie, and Snake Eyes in particular, the SEs a film gets, the more guilty pleasure you get from it.

It's out of ten, so here is Ninja Assassin's score:

   Two SEs out of ten. Boo!