Filled with a whole bunch of plot that narrows down to, “This guy’s gotta punch that guy and then it’s over!” and dragged down by a series of dour, ineffectual performances, “Ninja Assassin” is an old fashioned load of crap from beginning to end. There’s nothing to hold onto — the characters’ relationships are perfunctory, the action is impossible to follow, and there’s zero thematic resonance. It’s not that poorly made, per se — James McTeigue knows how to use a camera — but is depressingly bland and unoriginal. You’ve seen this movie before, and you hated it.
“Ninja Assassin” is in love with its fairly pedestrian story, which means the film takes its cues from the “Batman Begins”-ing of modern movies. It’s not enough to know something exists, we have to know where it came from, why it came to be. When we meet our hero, it has to be as a child, so we can see the building blocks of their heroism, the origins of their altruism. This approach lacks the imagination of some of the all-time great ninja movies, where the black-clad killers emerged from the shadows, performed audience-pleasing physical feats, and then vanished in a cloud of dust.
Here, we have an emphasis on a secret organization capturing kids and raising them to be ninjas from birth, a process visualized in the dullest, most perfunctory way possible. Even “300,” a movie comprised almost entirely of battle-training in slow motion, didn’t spend this much time showcasing kids fighting kids. We have a certain problem with the extended scenes of violence towards children, because the philosophy is messed up. Are these scenes meant to illustrate how terrible these kids’ lives end up? Then again, all the violent tricks of the trade learned during the harder-to-watch training sequences come into play when the lead character utilizes them to save the day (Screenwriting 101!), so they can’t be all bad, can they? Regardless, this forms an uneasy trilogy with “300” and “G.I. Joe” as far as recent movies where children wantonly kick the shit out of each other. What a trend.
Of course, because Hollywood can’t make a movie entirely populated with Asians, even though they’re in their Hollywood-safe bubble of punching and kicking automatons, there’s an entire subplot involving an American Europol agent in Berlin/Vancouver/Doesn’t Matter investigating the ninja clan and its origins. Naomie Harris (“Miami Vice”) plays the audience surrogate, the non-martial artist who gets to stand around and stare at… something (more on this in a bit)… while proclaiming, “Wow! Ninjas! This is crazy!” Worse yet, her dull as dishwater plot strand involves a lot of manila envelopes, pointless security footage and “tense” office meetings, and in the end, guess what? All her super secret investigating boils down to nothing.
Producer Joel Silver and the Wachowskis are clearly trying to make Rain happen. Rain is a Korean pop star who came to America with a role in their “Speed Racer,” and since that didn’t catch, they’ve devised a star vehicle for him. As an actor, Rain isn’t done any favors from a script that envisions him as a personality-less quiet ninja, which makes his later standard-issue action hero quips seem even further out of place. Sorry to say, but his handle on English remains shaky as well, so his delivery of certain lines comes across as questions when they should be answers, musings when they should be proclamations. In short, he’s terrible.
And as for that “something”? Well, we’d like to tell you it’s fighting. This is “Ninja Assassin,” right? Well, the narrative probably looks like this: Joel Silver wanted to introduce Rain to a wide audience, and quickly. He decided a ninja movie was the best way to do this, seeing as how Asians are only good for comic relief or delivering a kick in American films, and Rain sure as shit isn’t funny. But a ninja movie is a hassle for someone like Silver, who as a producer often has a couple of things going on at once. You’ve got to hire stuntmen, do multiple takes allowing for the fallibility of stuntmen and squib packages, and choreograph fights months in advance with trained professionals. Because Silver figured he could pull this off by taking shortcuts, he decided that the film would only feature fight scenes in the dark, and whatever you could see would be clearly CGI, including the many pools of blood. He also needed a studio fall guy, so he went with Wachowski surrogate James McTeigue, working from a script by Matthew Sand, later re-written by J. Michael Straczynski, as he claims, “on a weekend.”
With this project, James McTeigue single-handily removes himself from consideration on the list of studio filmmakers worth a damn. You can’t see any of the action during any specific fight scene until a kill shot confirms the hero has won. He wastes unnecessary time on the Europol set-up, and when it comes to the action he leans on exhausting repetition. One sequence finds Rain jumping from a series of canopies and falling dramatically each time before getting up to the next one, probably three minutes of screen time. Another finds Rain sprinting into heavy traffic, stopping to engage in hand-to-hand combat with one collection of ninjas while simultaneously being hit by what seem to be driverless cars — even though it lasts forever, the cars keep going straight towards the combatants. Throughout the fight sequences, Rain lays waste to a sea of ninjas, none of them apparently posing any sort of threat despite receiving the same exact training. The film utilizes a comical amountcartoonishly red and heavily unrealistic gore, which must have been McTeigue’s single personal touch on the film, trying to create some sort of light-red art spectacle whenever someone gets slashed. Takeshi Kitano did this pretty well a couple of years ago in “Zatoichi.” James McTeigue is no Takeshi Kitano.
What galls about “Ninja Assassin” is the laziness of it all. The egotism on display is astounding — a bunch of gaijin thinking all they had to do was shoot a movie in total darkness before handing it over to a few keyboard monkeys to process, resulting in the latest in a long line of films with a proud tradition of stuntwork and choreography. There’s no there there- this is very nearly a non-movie, and in a year with stuff like “Transformers” and “New Moon,” that’s really saying something. Seeing it in a packed theatre, you’re sure to hear people praising the nonsensical, impossible-to-understand action sequences particularly for the money shot endings and the often sadistic, mostly pointless violence — to his credit, James McTeigue generally knows how to pace a movie, so he shouldn’t be ashamed of making a living directing shitty studio fare from here on — however, seeing this unbiased, in an empty Tuesday afternoon screening (as there will be plenty after it opens), we dare you to not walk out. [D-]