Ninja Assassin

2009 ode to stabbing

Rating: 9/20 (Mark: 6/20; Amy: 6 or 7/20)

Plot: Jack at the video store told us that there wasn't one. There was one, but it really didn't matter.

I don't know what the Wachowskis had to do with this, but somebody needs to stop them. If you look up "stylized violence" in the dictionary, you'll have a description of this movie. There's blood flying all over the place, mostly startlingly contrasting to a swampy darkness on the rest of the screen, probably to hide any lack of real kung-fu skills. I correctly predicted that there would be a decapitation within the first five minutes of the movie. My brother said that characters were losing more blood than people actually have in their bodies. I had to wring my shirt dry when the movie finally ended. I'm not saying that this much violence is necessarily a bad thing, but that's all this movie has going for it. There are some gorgeously brutal moments, some fine but ultimately repetitive action sequences, and some more brutally gorgeous moments. But that's it. You won't care about the characters, you'll stop worrying about what's going on, and you'll slap your forehead as things get more and more preposterous. It's all just a bunch of showing off, lots of "Look at what my computer can do!" moments, and I think any real ninja watching this movie would be offended. Lots of laughable dialogue, laughable bad acting, and laughable action scenes, most memorably a scene when ninjas are running against the highway. I looked this movie up and discovered that the Wachowskis didn't care much for the original script, and writer J. Michael Straczynski apparently finished his rewrite in just fifty-three hours. It shows. I did pick out a Wilhelm scream when a ninja is blown off a roof with a rocket launcher. Yeah. That's the type of movie this is. It's the type of movie the Academy usually loves, the type where you can watch ninjas being blown off roofs with rocket launchers. The problem isn't that it's impossible to take any of this nonsense seriously. The problem is that this nonsense takes itself way too seriously.