Review: Ninja Assassin
Dec. 10th, 2009 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficI think sometimes in movies, there's one scene that sums up everything about the movie, whether it be the positives or the problems. In Ninja Assassin, there's a scene where the hero Rain and his girlfriend, both of whom are being raised by this abusive ninja clan... well, the girlfriend has been caged up to starve for letting a bonsai tree grow free (don't ask). So Rain brings her some water. Okay, that's fine. So, how does he give her the water? He has a drinking straw and she's in a cage, so does he just hold the straw up to her mouth so she can drink? No. He drinks some of the water, then puts the straw between their mouths like a dildo in Requiem For A Dream and... gives her the water that way. It's supposed to be romantic like a kiss, but it ends up being gross and stupid. That sums up the movie.
And okay, I know we weren't expecting a movie called Ninja Assassin to be smart. Sure, JMS helped write it, but ninjas are assassins, so calling this movie "Ninja Assassin" is like the Japanese making a movie called "Policeman Cop." But that brings us to the second problem, which is that this movie is a cocktease.
Let me 'splain. We start off with a scene of a ninja killing mobsters set kinda like the attack scenes in Batman Begins (you know, the ones that were roundly criticized?). He kills them all from the shadows, fine, fine. Then we cut to our hero Rain getting attacked at a laundromat. Okay, yeah, fight scene! Only five seconds in, we cut away, and when we get back, Rain has killed the (female) assassin and stuffed her hacked up remains in a washing machine. Right.
Then, I swear, the next half of the movie is just Rain sitting in his apartment training with swords and stuff while he has flashbacks to ninja girlfriend. Okay, he's good at kung-fu, we get it! Get to the assassinations! It's a movie called Ninja Assassin, if you're going to kill grammar, you can at least be truthful while you're doing it.
And I'll admit, some of the stuff with Rain's upbringing is well-written, even if there's one big problem with it that I'll get to in a minute. Although there is that scene where ninja girlfriend is cutting the ropes off bonsai trees to let them grow freely (ugh) and when Rain talks to her the conversation comes around to him not having a heart, yes, he literally says that (groan) and then ninja girlfriend puts her ear to his heart and says hello (vomit) and then has him listen to her heart, and I guess it's erotic because she has boobs. How did JMS do a rewrite and not cover that scene in red ink? I guess they even have Manic Pixie Dream Girls in hidden Japanese ninja fortresses.
So, spending all this time with Rain and his Manic Pixie Dream Girl, explaining why he's a nice ninja (although the movie never explains why MPDG is nice enough to make him nice. I guess she was just born with one of them thar magic vaginas), you'd think they'd at least have the decency to go somewhere interesting with it. Nope! She gets fridged, Rain goes into vendetta mode and, surprise surprise, spends the rest of the movie protecting a female target from the ninjas.
Fuck you, Hollywood. You'll always doing this. You take an amoral profession, like Mafia hitman or government assassin or whatever, that's interesting enough to make a movie about, but then you wuss out and decide that audiences don't want to see a Mafia hitman in a movie about Mafia hitmen, so he has to redeem himself and decide that for some reason he just can't bring himself to kill someone (usually a hot chick, but sometimes a kid. You'd think the forces of evil would know better than to send someone morally ambiguous to kill a kid. They should have a specific guy for that. I'd suggest checking around the child-free community). Then the whole movie is him or her protecting hot chick/hunky guy/precocious kid. The ur-example is Leon The Professional, of course, but since then, every fucking movie has been about that. Hitman, Elektra, The Bourne Identity, The Replacement Killers, Bangkok Dangerous, Ultraviolet, even Road To Perdition to some extent. If you're going to make a movie about a hired killer, please, come up with a different narrative. Have them fight someone who's even worse. Hell, in WW2 the Mob helped fight the Nazis, that's something.
But back to this movie. There's just all these cliches. There's the beleaguered cop on the trail of our hero, so our hero ends up protecting her as they're hunted, just like in Terminator... how they resisted the urge to have a love scene in a hotel room I'll never know.
Anyway, we finally get to some ninja-on-ninja violence with Rain stepping in to save the cop from a ninja. And this is another of those scenes I was talking about at the beginning of the post. The scene takes place at night... in a dark room... with two ninjas dressed entirely in black, even their faces are covered so we can't tell them apart at all... and the only light comes from the cop shining a flashlight around.
This is meant to be atmospheric and cool, but the movie's halfway over and it's time to give up the goods. Let us see some fucking ninja action! And we never really get to. There's a scene shamelessly ripped off of 300 where Rain hacks his way through ninjas, but even if you could distinguish all the black-clad ninjas from the dark backgrounds, there's all this shakycam and quick-cutting nonsense. The Wachowski Brothers were involved, right? I mean, say what you will about the Matrix sequels and V For Vendetta, but at least you could tell what was going on. These guys are actually getting worse as they get more experience! How's that possible?
Finally, in the last twenty minutes or so, they set a building on fire so you have enough light to see the ninjas fighting, but goddamn! You see more of Rain's abs in this movie than you do of the fight scenes. And if that's your thing, more power to you, but just have him do a softcore porn movie and be done with it. Don't tell there'll be ninjas.
Which brings us to the last big problem with this movie, which is that Rain can't act. At all. There's a scene where someone says "He looks more like a member of a boy band than a ninja!" and it's supposed to be funny since he was in a boy band, but yeah, he's a pretty boy. You don't buy him as a ninja for one second. It'd be like a cowboy movie where Justin Timberlake is strutting around as the biggest, baddest gunslinger of all times. Just come off it. You're the Dick In A Box guy. And Rain can't act at all. They do him the big favor of making him this stoic tough guy badass, which you don't buy because boy band, remember? But still, all this backstory is supposed to make you care about him, and he's just a cypher. There's nothing interesting about him, he has no personality quirks, he has no personality, he's like a department store mannequin that can do martial arts. There's just nothing going on there.
This really didn't need to be overthought. They just needed ninja action for an hour and a half, then they needed to step out of the way, but they tried to turn it into The Dark Knight and they didn't have a tenth of the talent. Well, Sho Kosugi at least does a good job as the evil head ninja, to the point where he's a lot more interesting than Rain, you kinda wish the movie was about him doing stuff. Everything and everyone else really screws the pooch. Stay away.
ETA: I should note that I really wanted to like this movie. It's gleefully R-rated in a world where the last Terminator and the last Die Hard have been PG-13 (and not required that much censorship to do it), the cast is headlined by POC, it's about fucking ninjas... which makes it failure not just tragic, but a moral wrong. Next time someone tries to make a movie about Asian people, some studio exec is going to say "Will it bomb like Ninja Assassin?" and we'll get another movie about Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock being white. Thanks a lot, Ninja Assassin guys, you've helped racism.
And okay, I know we weren't expecting a movie called Ninja Assassin to be smart. Sure, JMS helped write it, but ninjas are assassins, so calling this movie "Ninja Assassin" is like the Japanese making a movie called "Policeman Cop." But that brings us to the second problem, which is that this movie is a cocktease.
Let me 'splain. We start off with a scene of a ninja killing mobsters set kinda like the attack scenes in Batman Begins (you know, the ones that were roundly criticized?). He kills them all from the shadows, fine, fine. Then we cut to our hero Rain getting attacked at a laundromat. Okay, yeah, fight scene! Only five seconds in, we cut away, and when we get back, Rain has killed the (female) assassin and stuffed her hacked up remains in a washing machine. Right.
Then, I swear, the next half of the movie is just Rain sitting in his apartment training with swords and stuff while he has flashbacks to ninja girlfriend. Okay, he's good at kung-fu, we get it! Get to the assassinations! It's a movie called Ninja Assassin, if you're going to kill grammar, you can at least be truthful while you're doing it.
And I'll admit, some of the stuff with Rain's upbringing is well-written, even if there's one big problem with it that I'll get to in a minute. Although there is that scene where ninja girlfriend is cutting the ropes off bonsai trees to let them grow freely (ugh) and when Rain talks to her the conversation comes around to him not having a heart, yes, he literally says that (groan) and then ninja girlfriend puts her ear to his heart and says hello (vomit) and then has him listen to her heart, and I guess it's erotic because she has boobs. How did JMS do a rewrite and not cover that scene in red ink? I guess they even have Manic Pixie Dream Girls in hidden Japanese ninja fortresses.
So, spending all this time with Rain and his Manic Pixie Dream Girl, explaining why he's a nice ninja (although the movie never explains why MPDG is nice enough to make him nice. I guess she was just born with one of them thar magic vaginas), you'd think they'd at least have the decency to go somewhere interesting with it. Nope! She gets fridged, Rain goes into vendetta mode and, surprise surprise, spends the rest of the movie protecting a female target from the ninjas.
Fuck you, Hollywood. You'll always doing this. You take an amoral profession, like Mafia hitman or government assassin or whatever, that's interesting enough to make a movie about, but then you wuss out and decide that audiences don't want to see a Mafia hitman in a movie about Mafia hitmen, so he has to redeem himself and decide that for some reason he just can't bring himself to kill someone (usually a hot chick, but sometimes a kid. You'd think the forces of evil would know better than to send someone morally ambiguous to kill a kid. They should have a specific guy for that. I'd suggest checking around the child-free community). Then the whole movie is him or her protecting hot chick/hunky guy/precocious kid. The ur-example is Leon The Professional, of course, but since then, every fucking movie has been about that. Hitman, Elektra, The Bourne Identity, The Replacement Killers, Bangkok Dangerous, Ultraviolet, even Road To Perdition to some extent. If you're going to make a movie about a hired killer, please, come up with a different narrative. Have them fight someone who's even worse. Hell, in WW2 the Mob helped fight the Nazis, that's something.
But back to this movie. There's just all these cliches. There's the beleaguered cop on the trail of our hero, so our hero ends up protecting her as they're hunted, just like in Terminator... how they resisted the urge to have a love scene in a hotel room I'll never know.
Anyway, we finally get to some ninja-on-ninja violence with Rain stepping in to save the cop from a ninja. And this is another of those scenes I was talking about at the beginning of the post. The scene takes place at night... in a dark room... with two ninjas dressed entirely in black, even their faces are covered so we can't tell them apart at all... and the only light comes from the cop shining a flashlight around.
This is meant to be atmospheric and cool, but the movie's halfway over and it's time to give up the goods. Let us see some fucking ninja action! And we never really get to. There's a scene shamelessly ripped off of 300 where Rain hacks his way through ninjas, but even if you could distinguish all the black-clad ninjas from the dark backgrounds, there's all this shakycam and quick-cutting nonsense. The Wachowski Brothers were involved, right? I mean, say what you will about the Matrix sequels and V For Vendetta, but at least you could tell what was going on. These guys are actually getting worse as they get more experience! How's that possible?
Finally, in the last twenty minutes or so, they set a building on fire so you have enough light to see the ninjas fighting, but goddamn! You see more of Rain's abs in this movie than you do of the fight scenes. And if that's your thing, more power to you, but just have him do a softcore porn movie and be done with it. Don't tell there'll be ninjas.
Which brings us to the last big problem with this movie, which is that Rain can't act. At all. There's a scene where someone says "He looks more like a member of a boy band than a ninja!" and it's supposed to be funny since he was in a boy band, but yeah, he's a pretty boy. You don't buy him as a ninja for one second. It'd be like a cowboy movie where Justin Timberlake is strutting around as the biggest, baddest gunslinger of all times. Just come off it. You're the Dick In A Box guy. And Rain can't act at all. They do him the big favor of making him this stoic tough guy badass, which you don't buy because boy band, remember? But still, all this backstory is supposed to make you care about him, and he's just a cypher. There's nothing interesting about him, he has no personality quirks, he has no personality, he's like a department store mannequin that can do martial arts. There's just nothing going on there.
This really didn't need to be overthought. They just needed ninja action for an hour and a half, then they needed to step out of the way, but they tried to turn it into The Dark Knight and they didn't have a tenth of the talent. Well, Sho Kosugi at least does a good job as the evil head ninja, to the point where he's a lot more interesting than Rain, you kinda wish the movie was about him doing stuff. Everything and everyone else really screws the pooch. Stay away.
ETA: I should note that I really wanted to like this movie. It's gleefully R-rated in a world where the last Terminator and the last Die Hard have been PG-13 (and not required that much censorship to do it), the cast is headlined by POC, it's about fucking ninjas... which makes it failure not just tragic, but a moral wrong. Next time someone tries to make a movie about Asian people, some studio exec is going to say "Will it bomb like Ninja Assassin?" and we'll get another movie about Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock being white. Thanks a lot, Ninja Assassin guys, you've helped racism.
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-11 01:18 am (UTC)The title alone was a sure sign what that movie was going to be! I already predicted that Manic Pixie Dream Girl in there too.
Watch Ninja assassin Online
Date: 2010-01-04 12:18 am (UTC)Enjoy the movie!!
no subject
Date: 2015-06-27 07:35 am (UTC)