Not even the artfully laconic subtlety of the title can prepare you for the deft mastery, narrative virtuosity and aching beauty of this prescient modern parable – a parable which adroitly traverses three of the most pressing anxieties of the late Naughties neo-imperial world: escalating paranoia counter-posed with unbridled personal anonymity, the irreversible decay of the communicability of the human soul, and the fading of tradition caught squarely amid the age-old tensions of the rural/urban binary. Not.
To do true justice to this film, I feel it necessary to begin with a comparable amount of nonsense. Now I try to live life by the sturdy aphorism “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” and I tried, really tried to in this case, but this film really isn’t going to budge any further from the simple premise of ninjas that are assassins.
The film centres around one such ninja assassin, Raizo, played by Korean pop sensation, Rain. Raizo, like so many other Japanese children, apparently, was abducted at early infancy by a shady ninja-trainer, who proceeds to force his newly acquired children to beat one another with sticks in a hilltop commune, whilst living by a bunch of arbitrary maxims that really don’t mean anything at all, such as ‘blood begets revenge’ and ‘pain fulfils hurt’. Crosscut with the hackneyed Bildungsroman tale of Raizo emerging as the most promising ninja assassin, we follow Mika, a young, ‘inquisitive, yet sexy’ researcher for a secret service based in Berlin. What this ’secret service’ is supposed to be, or which government it represents, doesn’t even matter because it seems pretty obvious that the filmmakers themselves haven’t invested much time or effort in bolstering the film with any gleam of authenticity whatsoever. Mika works under Agent Maslow, played, bizarrely, by the disconcertingly small-nosed bloke from Coupling. Even the actors seem quite aware of how pretend the world in which they inhabit feels. Mr, Coupling at one point casually orders to his team to have the ‘International Mega Attack Stealth Squad mobilized in five minutes’ or something to that effect.
Anyway, it transpires that because Mika is delving a little too deeply into this world of ninja assassins that she pisses all the ninja assassins off sufficiently to make them want to come and assassinate her. Fair enough, really. Raizo, who in spite of all his assassinating and whatnot, is also a ‘good guy’ with ‘morals’, one of which includes saving sexy shady secret service researchers. Sandwiched in between all of this, by the way, is a heck of a lot of decapitating, slicing, incising, stabbing and general assassinating. This did quench that part of me which enjoys the poetry of meaningless, stylised, gymnastic filmic violence and a lot of it, to the film’s credit, is very impressive; I still marvel at how any of it is actually filmed. Perhaps the fact that the Wachowski brothers produced the film goes some way to explaining this, but what staggered me more is how it could be inset into such a flimsily scripted, sham blockbuster vehicle. Then I realised it was directed by James McTeigue, who also directed V for Vendetta.
Essentially, Ninja Assassin is couched utterly in the ridiculous. The centre-piece – those eponymous ninja assassins themselves – are my
favourite element, and uphold the prevailing tone of nonsense that sustains the length of the film. Irrespective of preconceptions younmight have had about ninjas as silent, stealthy creatures of the night, when hunting in packs, they apparently all whisper a disorientating and threatening chorus of ninja and assassin related buzzwords such as ‘kill’, ’silence’, ‘blood’, ’slice’ and ‘honour’. In a final showdown sequence between Raizo and the ninja-trainer, we learn that ninja assassins can heal their wounds a la Wolverine and also turn invisible. Also, ninja assassins have no sense of humour whatsoever.
Whatsoever.
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