Ninja Assassin is THE most awesomely terrible movie of the year. What is an awesomely bad movie you ask? Well, it is when a film is created by a team of people who understand that their source material is terrible, yet they embrace it and try to deliver the audience a kick ass, and rather funny film to entertain you for taking the time out of your day to see such a piece of shit. Ninja Assassin is practically the definition of awesomely bad. The plot is downright non-existent, yet the majority of it is spent in flash backs showing the main character, Raizo (Rain- yeah sick name right?) and his progression from being a prized student of his ninja clan to being the clan’s number one target. Bah, who am i kidding? Watch the trailer and you know the plot of the movie except maybe a few tidbits about Interpol and a few other people that are bland as the popcorn sold at your local movie theater. Director James McTeigue really tries more so on delivering what you’d expect from a movie called “Ninja Assassin”, which is people getting cut to ribbons by buff Asian men and women dressed in black with tons of sharp stabby objects. McTeigue absolutely kills by bringing all of these expectations and turning the volume up so much that it borders on ninja-cutting euphoria. Yeah, that’s right Ninja Assassin is the most entertaining of all American ninja assassin-genre movies.
Usually this is the paragraph where I give you, the readers, a glimpse into the plot of the movie. However, since there is no plot to this movie, I will instead talk about the beauty of showmanship and it’s wonderful execution in this ludicrous piece of cinema. Literally every single time a sharp object comes on screen, it will have blood on it five minutes after it is shown to you. In a way I can see that McTiegue is somewhat inspired by the charismatic demonstrations that Billy Mays (R.I.P) gave us with the amazing “as-seen-on-tv” products such as OxiClean, the Ding king, and the Awesome Auger, because as each ninja weapon is revealed it undergoes thorough testing against live bad ass shadow-ninjas. By the end of the movie I wanted a chain-whip just to swing around and destroy wood paneled floors and oriental tea houses. This is a pretty big accomplishment in my eyes as showmanship has really been lacking in the movie industry and Billy Mays was truly a legend in the craft. You could say that I mentioned this before in my review of G.I Joe, but the accelerator suits weren’t really the focus of the movie. In Ninja Assassin, the focus is clearly on legendary ninja weapons and how easily they cut through your opponent and through the foundations of your household. More importantly, McTiegue and the movie crew want you, the audience, to go out and buy one of these weapons and celebrate the fantastic act of being a ninja all in the memory of Billy Mays.
YAY:
- Usually the opening sequence of films contains maybe a small scale action scene or an introduction to the main characters of the story. Ninja Assassin blows the doors off the hinges in the first five minutes as one measly ninja destroys an entire hideout filled with Japanese mobsters with tons of guns. Now each kill is not your stereotypical “Kill Bill” slice and dice act. Instead the ninja meticulously destroys not only the limbs and torsos of each gangster but also their soul as he tears his invisible sword or whatever he has into his enemies only to reveal one thing about his personality and that is “I am a bad ass”.
- Lately it seems as though many action films rely too much on fast-cut editing to make the sequences feel more ruthless or gritty, or they focus more on the slow-mo kills that make audiences hoot and holler. Ninja’s apparently like a combination of both due to McTiegue’s fluctuation of illustrating how quick the combatants are and how freaking sick it is to see a ninja-star stick into people’s main arteries and eye-sockets. The majority of the time it works and you can really get into the gore-splattering action but there are a select few times when you will want to just see the camera sit still for one more second to see which way the next spurt of the victim’s blood is going to come from.
- The flashback scenes that dominate the plot of the film are pretty much the same ones from Zack Snyder’s “300″ only much, much more fleshed out. They feel the same, but Ninja Assassin takes a bit more pride in their origin story as it is the best written aspect of the entire movie. Whoever wrote those flashbacks should just write ninja-fiction all day as they have truly found their calling.
NAY:
- Some of the special effects are downright atrocious and laughable, yet somehow I walked out of the theater feeling okay with that as it did seem intentional. How bad are they? Watch 2002′s Queen of the Damned starring Aaliyah and Stuart Townsend and focus on the effect used when the vampires run fast. It’s basically the same thing only I guess it looks less awkward in this movie because ninjas are cooler than Anne Rice.
- All the actors that are not ninjas in the film are pretty awful. Not Channing Tatum bad or Mexican Kid From Transformers 2 bad, but just bad. It’s almost as though they phoned-in their segments in person which shows the amount of vacancy in the scenes that don’t have natives of the east tearing through their kinsman with “knife-to the-eye” accuracy.
That’s Ninja Assassin in a nutshell. If you like sharp objects then this is your movie. If you like ninjas, assassins, Billy Mays, OxiClean, blood, bad acting, or violence then this is the movie for you. Entertainment is usually a word coined for summer films that are just mediocre, after Thanksgiving it should be used to describe awesomely bad movies like James McTiegue’s Ninja Assassin.
Note: Though the Wachowski Bros. are producers on this movie, it would have been this bad/good with or without their involvement and are therefore not mentioned in this film for creative inspiration.
