I almost certainly knew what was in store for me when I went to the cinema today to see Ninja Assassin. Glamorous, embellished, maybe even with a hint of homoeroticism, an action film with a thin and fragile plot and a whole lot of CGI-enhanced action. And so it happened.
Since childhood, the legendary but very mysterious Ozunu clan taught Reizo the art of killing. They are ruthless teachers with no emotion, and Raizo himself is one of the best fighters in the group. But as soon as he fell in love with a beautiful girl from the clan, his morale was broken, and in a matter of days he destroyed what he had been striving for by training all his life - the opportunity to become an ideal killer. She melted his cold heart, but when she was executed by the clan for attempting to escape, Raizo rebelled against his spies and disappeared, waiting for the chance to strike a fatal blow to the organization.
Years passed, and a pretty girl Interpol agent named Mika, leading an investigation related to ninjas, managed to pick up Raizo's trail in Berlin. But she attracted too much attention and became the target of the evil Ozunu clan, who will stop at nothing to shower her with a hail of shuriken and other similar sharp metal objects. The fun begins.
The weakest points in the film are the plot and script. This is a poor philosophical melodrama with disgusting dialogue and a weak plot. The dialogues and acting don't help either. Rain, while incredibly beautiful both whole and cut up, is essentially not a master of drama, limiting his sentences to two or three at a time, and looking serious and in pain while doing so. However, mind you, he moves quite well and creates a convincing image of an action hero.
80s ninja movie superstar Sho Kosugi plays the villain and it was great to see him there, but guys - the dude has aged.
The problem with everything else is that director James McTeigue predictably decided to approach the fight scenes with a lot of cuts, and made the mistake of filming most of them in the dark, supposedly ninjas love shadows and other crap. Therefore, not only will you not be able to properly see what is happening there, but you will also not be able to see anything at all because everything there is in the dark. It's amazing that the Wachowski brothers are behind this project, but one of the reasons for the praise of “The Matrix” was that you could clearly see the actors in long takes without the use of cuts and stuntmen. There is almost no such thing here.
It's clear that McTeigue tried to make the film look like a comic book, using superpowers, so there's a lot of computer graphics in the fights, saturating the fights with gigabytes of fake blood and traces in the air from the main character's use of a terrifying weapon with a chain (they even embellished the close-ups on the computer , on which fried meat is poured with ketchup). I was surprised at how noticeable most of the CG blood was in these dark scenes. I have to admit that I really remember the opening sequence of the film, with such an exorbitant amount of computer graphics that I could only laugh and enjoy. Unfortunately, there was nothing better than this scene in the film. In addition, it foreshadowed the slowest part of the plot, the likes of which I have not seen for a long time.
But while the action is highly stylized, the superhumans otherwise look quite ordinary, even slightly mundane, which creates an imbalance between the feel of the film and its appearance.
This is definitely an action flick made for fun, and I'm sure a lot of people will enjoy it. For those who were expecting something similar in spirit to “V for Vendetta,” I advise you to look elsewhere. And those who were looking for embellished and bloody martial arts may find a couple of good moments in it.
Author: Swarez
Source: Twitch
Translation: EvilDollaR
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Tags: Ninja Assassin, James McTeague, Rain, Sho Kosugi
Tags: Ninja Assassin, James McTeague, Rain, Sho Kosugi
We'll have to see what they did with computer graphics...