Ninja Assassin
Director: James McTeigue
Writers: story by Matthew Sand, screenplay by Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski
Producers: Grant Hill, Joel Silver, Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski
Stars: Rain, Naomie Harris, Shô Kosugi, Rick Yune, Ben Miles
The blood is very important. Any self-respecting movie that sets out to call itself Ninja Assassin is going to spill some blood, and you have to make a decision how that blood is going to look and behave. There are more options than you may have ever considered.
The movie before us is a product of the Matrix-making Wachowskis, their long-time champion/producer Joel Silver, and their apprentice director James McTeigue (who also helmed V for Vendetta for them), and with resumes like that you know they thought long and hard about the blood. What they settled on is garish, at the candy-colored end of the spectrum like in George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, and it does not squirt or spurt, but splashes and splatters. In our world the average human body contains 5-6 quarts of blood. In the world of this movie, characters carry a few extra quarts inside for visual dash.
Bodies get cleaved, sliced, diced and whipped. Bullets are boring when a ninja can make you burst open like a water balloon. The violence starts early and at full volume, and on the basis of its first startling fatality I can say I appreciate a genre movie that is not out to give you any illusions about the experience you are about to have. This movie is neither smarter than a dog nor deeper than a puddle, but you probably knew that beforehand.
At the least I can say that it makes an earnest attempt to dot its I’s and cross its T’s – to tell a story that holds up to rudimentary scrutiny, and to give its characters goals and obstacles (usually sharp ones). And that it has the benefit of Korean pop star/model Rain in the lead role; he proves fascinating to watch not from any emotive ability, but simply due to his muscles, his cheekbones, and his grace, all of which are given ample display. You are not really watching an actor – a really beautiful, really violent dancer is the more accurate description.
He plays Raizo, a former Ninja Assassin who rebelled against his ultra-secretive clan and his trainer/surrogate father Ozunu. Ozunu is played by Enter the Ninja legend Shô Kosugi, because these filmmakers have seen a ninja movie or three, and he runs a secretive school for promising orphans – it is more than implied that he takes an active hand in their orphaning. Raised in martial cruelty, pitted against one another on a daily basis, the children are taught to be silent, obedient, superhumanly agile, and merciless.
Hiding out in Germany, he exposes himself to their vengeance when he intervenes in their attempt to rub out a EUROPOL detective (Naomie Harris) who has been trying to tie contemporary gangland murders to the legends of the assassin clan. And then there is fighting, and chasing, and more chasing, and more fighting, and the blood is going every which way. Harris is such a spayed damsel as to be barely recognizable from her steel-spined breakthrough role in 28 Days Later.
The shooting draft of the screenplay came from the hands of Babylon 5’s creator, J. Michael Straczynski, who takes to it like a carpenter who has built enough house frames in his day. He knows the script will not do the heavy lifting in the eventual movie, but that he should tend to the sensible play of intersecting motivations in the spaces between carnage. He does not go about this dazzlingly, but he is not lazy, either, and that matters.
McTeigue does not have much to offer as a director but an ample familiarity with contemporary visual flashes – speed-ramps and digital animation enhances to the action. Raizo’s weapon of choice, Wikipedia helpfully tells me, is a nasty tool called a “kyoketsu shoge”, a double-edged blade swung from a long chain. Aided by the effects department, the kyoketsu shoge often acts as if it believes itself to be the star of its own separate movie – in 3-D. This stuff is the filmic equivalent of slang, and might fool you into thinking the movie is more exciting and less silly than it is. I personally prefer imaginative but low-tech sights like the gag of a nearly-ruined car pulling into a motel parking lot caked in hundreds of metal stars.
In some scenes, ninjas are fearsome, and capable of laying waste to fully-armed tactical units of police. In others, Raizo makes salad out of them. In still others, those police are inexplicably succeeding, while doing very little differently from before – all that has changed has their proximity to the happy end of the movie. Ultimately this movie is neither particularly good nor particularly memorable.
But it does do a few things commendably right, like that blood. And Rain – tormented, frequently shirtless – is more striking than the usual vacant bods you might see. In his 2007 single “Rainism”, Wikipedia helpfully tells me, he got into trouble for a lyric that translates as “Trembling inside your shaking body is my magic stick.” Let it not be said he doesn’t know how to put his assets to use, no matter which weapon the situation demands.