Dec. 02, 2009 - Issue #737: Climate Crossroads

Ninja Assassin

Right from the start—man's head sliced off above his lower jaw—this movie gets a O, as in Type-O. It and every other type of blood is on display here, spattering across the screen as if it's a canvas for a hemophiliac Jackson Pollock. Like porn for vampires, Ninja Assassin streams and courses and spurts along, signifying nothing, other than the emergency-room fact that people's bodies are fountains of blood waiting to jet.

Sexy Korean pop singer Rain, perhaps cast for his name alone, considering the movie's weather—darkly overcast, with a 100 percent chance of showering body parts—is Raizo, who'd been, along with fellow foundlings, a literally scarred orphan-turned-ninja assassin of the Ozunu Clan. Its home is a temple hidden high in snow-capped mountains, deep in Cliché-Land. But young Raizo, angry at the clan's killing of a girl who loved him—probably because she knew he would grow up to be played by sexy, sexy Rain—breaks away from the clan. Soon he's helping Europol "forensics researcher" Mika (Naomie Harris) take down the clan and end its history of assassinations-for-hire (the going rate has always been 100 pounds of gold, ninjas being smart enough to avoid tying their economy to the US dollar).

Not since The Passion of the Christ has a film so adoringly fetishized a man's slashed and sliced upper body. This movie, produced by the Warshowskis, officially drops them to 12th spot on the Best Entertainment-Making Brothers List*, and was apparently inspired by Rain's martial-arts performance in Speed Racer. From the shots of his glistening, literally ripped abs, though, it was more likely inspired by profit-hunger for his female fan-base.

The movie seeps out like an incredibly long-winded music video, if a music video offered blood instead of music. The whoosh lines of weapons are digitally added as if we're watching a comic book, except that comic books generally have more developed characters and a more believable plot. The film wants to create tension, but how can it when Raizo loses bucketfuls of blood without dying or falls off an office tower and survives? And a clan that can kill anyone, floating in and out of shadows like an octopus' ink-fart, can't knock off a shrieking Mika armed with only a gun, but Raizo can carve through them all like a one-Hobbit army versus cardboard Orcs.

The romance here isn't even a romance, it's so chaste. First ninja-girl and later Mika kisses Raizo but he can't awake any non-killing passion. So Romeo and Juliet submits to Triumph of the Will, the fascist death-cult (the individual's subsumed by the clan; weakness is not allowed) quickly taking over. Violence substitutes for sex, men getting down and dirty so the camera can eye their bloody climaxes—in this blood-porn, it's nothing but money shots and the effect is, of course, predictable and degrading and quickly boring. There's so much sadism here, you've got to be a real masochist to get through it all.

*After the Lumière, Coen, Maysles, Duplass, Quay, Polish, Kuchar, Farrelly, Hughes, Spierig, and Parker brothers, but still ahead of the Menendez brothers.
 

Ninja Assassin
Directed by James McTeigue
Written by Matthew Sand, J. Michael Straczynski
Starring Rain, Naomie Harris, Sho Kosugi

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