Ninja Assasin Review

I had the pleasure of seeing Ninja Assasin the night it was released, and I have to say it was exactly what I was expecting and hoping for. The film tells the story of Raizo the ninja (played by South Korean pop-star Rain) who is on a quest for revenge (of course) against his former ninja confederates and his master.  The story is pretty much irrelevant just making excuses for people to be chopping each other up with the energy of a nuclear powered quisinart.

The two western main characters "Maslow" and "Mika" were pretty much completely irrelevant and worthless which is the main problem with the story, of course their interpol connections make them very handy for calling in shuriken-fodder for the evil ninjas which is the only reason I can even see having them involved in the plot at all.

Prepare to not care about this person

 The action in the film however is superb, with excellent stylization, top notch effects, and buckets upon buckets of gratuitous blood spraying out everywhere. In case you had trouble understanding the last sentance

DO NOT see this movie if the following things disturb or offend you:  Peoples' heads being chopped off, people being chopped in half, peoples' heads being chopped in half , people getting sharp objects thrown into their eyes/ every painful area of the body, people being stabbed in the neck, people being stabbed in the femoral artery etc, etc. In fact this movie was so completely filled with great gouts of viscera that I almost felt guilty for enjoying it, like I should have been horrified by the level of carnage.  Maybe I should also point out that Raizo is the most hardcore of all the ninjas, and yet at the end of the movie even he looks like this: 

 On another note, this movie used CGI created blood effects, and were actually successful enough that I didn't feel that it detracted from the exploitation grindhouse-y feel of the movie.  The movie also featured several really cool ninja weapons; the following clip features two of them Raizo's whip blade and Takeshi's dual sided Katana:




Of course if you have trouble suspending your disbelief you may have problems with this movie, It isn't the greatest plot to begin with, and on top of it the ninja's do have full-on magic powers, like limited teleportation and the ablity to heal wounds by chanting some magic words and making crazy magic hand gestures.  If you are the sort of person who is going to sit in the back of the theatre and say "That wouldn't really happen in REAL life" you are going to be sorely disappointed because realism is not what this film was going for. 

In all I give the film a solid 8.5 decapitated ninjas out of ten.