Ninja Assassin
Friday, December 11th, 2009, 7:05 pm
If I were a writer, a real actual writer with a job and a paycheck and an
obligation to my employer to deliver n words about x movies, I
would have hated Ninja Assassin and probably wished all sorts of curses
on director James McTeigue, producers the Wachowskis, the writing team, the
actors, the grips, the whole lot. Not because the movie was terrible. No,
terrible movies are easy to review. You just pick on an actor or two, talk
about the director's vicious lack of talent (to quote an Anthony Lane phrase),
and mention how the writers don't seem to have a basic concept of three-act
structure. Throw in a few jokes to lighten the mood and you're done. No, the
movies that are hard to write about are the ones that are bad while still being
competent.
Luckily, I'm just a blogger, because Ninja Asssassin, is bad but
competent. The story is told in parallel fashion, the present mixed with
flashbacks, and it's fairly coherent: Raizo (Rain, a Korean popstar, which was
the subject of a sort of wink-and-nod joke at one point) is an orphan raised to
be an asssassin by a secretive group whose roots go back hundreds of years.
Raizo gets mad at the group because they kill anyone who tries to escape them,
including the girl (also in training -- these ninjas are no sexists) he's
fallen in love with. Raizo wants to bring the group down. Enter Mika, a
researcher with "Europol" (what, Interpol would have sued if you'd used their
name? (Actually, considering the brutal final scene, they might have.)) who
has somehow happened upon evidence of the ninjas. The ninjas of course try to
kill her, but Raizo hears of the plan and stops them. Chaos, bloody fighting,
and a final showdown ensue.
Sounds pretty standard, right? And that's precisely what it is. Your average
action-movie plot, told in your average action-movie way. Really, the only
notable feature is the video-game-style sprays of blood every time someone gets
cut. And boy do a lot of people get cut, because these are ninjas, you know.
They don't use guns.
The ninjas do have some neat powers, like Wolverine-style healing and the
ability to basically disappear. They also move really fast in the shadows.
The healing is at least explained in a sense: the master at the training
academy displays the ability in one flashback and says that this is one of the
powers of the clan. The disappearing and moving really fast? Not so much.
They just kind of happen. Raizo doesn't seem to be able to do either thing,
though, maybe because he escaped the clan? But then he does the disappearing
thing in the final battle, which seems like it's supposed to be a big moment,
but it wasn't sold at all. Why was it a big moment? I have no idea. The
master sure seemed surprised by Raizo's disappearance, but since he'd just been
pulling the same shit, and since he trained Raizo, his reaction was baffling.
A lot of my other quibbles are the same things you'd hear at the end of any
martial-arts movie. How come Mika manages to escape the ninjas with like three
scratches on her pretty face when Raizo gets fucked up? How come every
cop with an automatic weapon gets blasted to hell by some badass sword work but
Mika's partner manages to survive with just a handgun? How come Mika, a
forensic researcher of all things, gets brought along to the final
battle? Why on earth does this Japanese assassin sect apparently train in the
Black Forest in Germany? These are all annoyances, things that just don't make
sense, but they're also the kinds of things that you have to brush away if you
want to enjoy any action movie. That doesn't mean they can be forgiven
as a matter of giving the movie some semi-objective grade, or as a matter of my
enjoyment sitting in the movie theater, but it matters in terms of
expectations. I never expected to walk out of Ninja Assassin (Ninja
Assassin, for god's sakes) having experienced a marvel of watertight
screenwriting.
A word (or a few) about the action. The style of action movies these days, and
it's been much commented on, seems to be to put us right in the middle of
things in the hopes that we'll experience the battle, and damn the
consequences in terms of actually seeing what's going on. Ninja
Assassin seems to mostly avoid this. Most of the fights happen in the
dark, but these are ninjas we're talking about. That's where the fights are
supposed to happen! And the darkness is crisp, contrasted with the murky
darkness of the recent Batman movies or Public Enemies. Does that make
sense? I think what it comes down to is that you don't see everything, but
what you do see, you see in sharp focus. In Batman, you see everything, but
you see it poorly. And like I said, in a movie about ninjas, this is a
completely sensible choice. You're not supposed to be able to see ninjas
fight.
Also, thankfully, McTeigue, despite being a Wachowski disciple, only used
"bullet time" once that I can remember, although you'd have to call it "ninja
star time" in this case. Used just that once, it was kind of cool, although it
also felt out of place precisely because it was used just that once.
So I've said all of that, and hopefully I've been able to convey the abiding
mediocrity of the film and its utter lack of ambition. Now comes the
disappointing part for me, which happened when the final credits rolled. J.
Michael Straczynski was a writer on this film. Straczynski is, of course, an
extremely notable comics writer. I'm most familiar with his Rising
Stars series, but his work on Spider Man is, I think, also very well
regarded. More importantly, he was the writer on Babylon 5 (out
of 110 episodes, he wrote an astounding 92 of them, an astounding number). I
never watched Babylon 5, but I'm told that this is my loss, as it's
supposed to have been Battlestar Galactica-like in its adult approach
and its use of science fiction the way science fiction is best used: to tell
stories of other worlds that resound in our own. Take that information and
meld it with everything I've said about Ninja Assassin and you can see
why, when Straczynski's name rolled by at the end, I groaned in disappointment.
Why'd you do it?
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