I was wondering where all these movies went! Back in the eighties you had movies where the likes of Arnold Swarzenegger, Jeane-Claude Vanne-Dame and Steven Seagal battled, shot and fought their way through bloody and ridiculous fight scenes. For the last decade we’ve had hardly any of these since the film industry realised that you make more money with PG13 movies! When Bruce Willis can’t even say his catch phrase in Die Hard 4, you know something’s wrong.
Enter Ninja Assassin. A movie that starts with a room of people being killed in the most gruesome ways you will have seen outside a slasher movie, and carries on in much the same way.
The film follows Raizo, a young man who was raised by the ninjas to kill for his clan. The training is brutal and he has flashbacks of the constant torment the teacher put him through in the name of making him a better killing machine. It turns out to have worked too well when Raizo finally decides he’s had enough and sets out to kill every last one of his clan for basically being a bunch of murderising dicks. There’s a woman from Interpol, Patrick from Coupling and about a hundred SWAT soldiers, but they’re not as important because, you know, NINJAS!
It’s a simple enough concept, and an even simpler story, but it’s the execution that matters, in some cases literally.
Your first impression is that Ninja Assassin is gory, really, really gory. But presumably either the props department started to run out of severed limbs and blood or they decided to pace themselves a little more and the rest of the movie tones it down a little with the occasional limb severing and usual blood spraying. It’s still more gore than most other movies nowadays, but it’s still a pity, I’d have loved to see the amount of offal the Saw movies throw around in a movie that isn’t, you know, shit.
The fight scenes themselves are beautifully performed by Jeong “Rain” Ji-hoon, managing to play his killing machine part extremely well considering he was originally famous as a pop star. Can you imagine Robbie Williams or Will Young cutting anyone up with a knife on a chain? I didn’t think so! The action is beautifully shot, which makes sense when the Wachowski brothers are producing it and the writing and pacing manage to make the visceral combat entertaining every step of the way. It’s also surprisingly imaginative for its genre, like having a tense fight scene in the middle of a road suddenly being interrupted by the bad guy being run over mid-fight, which manages to be both surprising and utterly hilarious!
If this movie has a real flaw, it’s that the story is a bit thin in places. It’s implied that Raizo has a major rival in the ninja clan, but since they’re all wearing face masks half the time you can’t really tell who he is and why we should really care. You won’t really mind when you’re watching Raizo fight fifteen ninja at once with a sword in each hand, but it would still be nice to have more than one main villain.
If you were wondering where all the good action movies went in the last ten years, they’re all right here! If you wanted to go back to the glory days of Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone then you owe it to yourself to buy this movie and Shoot Em Up on DVD several times.
