Ninja Assassin

Putting the yuk—make that yecch—in yakuza, Ninja Assassin
(Warner Bros.; 99 minutes; R; widescreen; 2009) is a crimson cavalcade
of lopped-off limbs, fast-and-furious clichés and ineffective emoting
that still could have made for some dumb fun at the multiplex—if only
it wasn’t so damn humorless. Perhaps that’s the fault of the movie’s
co-producers, Larry and Andy Wachowski, the filmmaking fraternity
behind The Matrix trilogy, yet they’re also comic-book fanboys
at heart who take these stylized yet pretentious action flicks a tad
too seriously.

In the scenario cooked up by Matthew
Sand and J. Michael Straczynski (the latter scribe has penned issues
for both Marvel and DC Comics empires), a snowy mountain retreat in the
Far East is the locale for the Clan of the Black Sand. It’s the
training ground for orphan kids who are shanghaied to the school, then
instructed, via years of cruel lessons in the methods of efficient
sadism, to become merciless adult ninjas who get to wear black-masked
outfits, throw razor-sharp five-pointed stars and go on to careers as
killers for various global governments. (Does Blackwater know about
this?) 

Meanwhile in Berlin, Europol forensic
researcher Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris) is probing the connections of
various politicos who have been bumped off, and it doesn’t take that
much legwork for Mika to trace these killings to the clan. Which brings
us to Raizo (played by Korean pop star Rain), a hunky, inscrutable
fella adept at the ninja playbook, but also unable to heal the
emotional scars brought on by clan master Ozunu (Sho Kosugi), a
tortured relationship that is unraveled during a series of
yawn-inducing flashbacks.

Rain isn’t quite a Method-acting monsoon, although his supporting role in the Wachowskis’ candy-colored Speed Racer opus (2008) apparently bowled over the boys to such an extent that they quickly spun off Ninja Assassin
as an action vehicle for him. Still, it’s unfair to carp about his
stoic performance in this flimsy-plotted package, in which even the
actual Berlin locations feel like they were instead filmed on a Burbank
back lot. 

James McTeigue is credited as Ninja Assassin’s traffic cop, and while he was able to work with the comic-book mythology handed to him as the director of V for Vendetta
(2006), he gets downright clunky attempting to depict the martial-arts
mayhem for this entry. Even the potentially noirish aspects of this
hyperviolent movie, with the ninjas stealthily emerging from the
shadows to deliver the lethal lowdown, are filmed in such darkness that
it’s hard to tell who’s killing whom. 

Per usual for this century’s contributions to the ass-kicking genre, Ninja Assassin
boasts frenzied editing techniques that render the chop-socky
choreography as meaningless blurs of random slaughter. Also, McTeigue’s
juxtapositions of past and present sequences result in such a narrative
jumble that at one point actress Harris’ Mika character has to explain
what’s going on to slow-on-the-uptake moviegoers. 

Meanwhile, upchuck seems to be the
unspoken mantra for all the kinetic carnage, furthered by
computer-graphic (accent on the last word) imagery that ladles the
splatter with all sorts of eviscerations, beheadings and other gonzo
ginzu-ing of body parts. Early in this slice-and-dice bloodbath, one
sequence featuring the eruptions of gory geysers is immediately
followed by a close-up of a Europol agent applying splotches of ketchup
to his fast-food lunch.  

Beyond all the special-effects fakery
and the incoherent storytelling, at least Sho Kosugi manages to stand
out with his old-school villainy as the malevolent Ozunu. A veteran of
the cheapjack ninja cycle ground out by Cannon Films in the 1980s,
Kosugi extracts the utmost from hackneyed declarations like “Weakness
compels strength; betrayal begets blood.” He’s likewise supremely
hiss-worthy when telling Raizo during a brutal lesson, “If you think
that’s pain, you are mistaken,” then jams his fingers underneath
Raizo’s rib cage to prove his point. 

That the Kosugi mini-homage emerges from such a derivative hodgepodge, however, demonstrates that Ninja Assassin
doesn’t have much driving it beyond the Wachowskis’
let’s-make-a-cool-movie mystique. To coin a term from their own
childhood, when are these dinks going to grow up?