Ninja Assassin / Ninja Assassin should have been the coolest movie of the holiday season (besides, possibly, Sherlock Holmes). It had a simple concept, ninjas slicing the crap out of each other. What could be cooler? But something very wrong and lazy happened on the road to black-masked box office triumph and the result is an incomprehensible mess in almost every way.

Korean pop superstar and Stephen Colbert’s arch-nemesis Rain is Raizo, a kidnapped orphan raised and trained by the cruel Lord Ozuno to become a ninja assassin. He loses his faith in his new “family” when they kill a female student he fell in love with. He chooses to betray them and goes on the run and into hiding, emerging only to slay his former clan members one by one. At the same time, a pretty Europol agent (Naomie Harris–28 Days Later, Miami Vice) tracks his movements and eventually becomes his ally on his mission of vengeance.

Director James McTeigue knows how to handle genre projects. He brought gravity and weight to the comic book adaptation V for Vendetta, but here, he barely seems to have showed up for work. None of the skill and story momentum he brought to the previous project is on display in Ninja; it appears to have been directed exclusively by second units and a Macbook. Obviously the man needs to be given a strong script before he’s to be allowed anywhere near a camera ever again.

Rain does fine enough as an actor although most of his performance is purely physical. At least, he worked very hard in the gym because all that’s really required of him is to swing his sword, throws his stars, whirl a nifty weapon made up of a chain and sickle, and basically just stretch and flex his muscles without a shirt on. Whenever he does speak though, he reminds one of Christopher Lambert back in the first Highlander film. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to your DVD collection. Rick Yune (The Joyluck Club, Die Another Die) plays Raizo’s childhood enemy with proper glowering and this part should secure his status as Hollywood’s go-to Seoul baddie. (Lord Ozuno seems to be raiding only Korean orphanages for his assassin recruits.) Ozuno himself is played by legendary Japanese actor Sho Kosugi, best known for his roles in such 80s pulp flicks Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, and Ninja III: The Domination, thus casting him for this project was a no-brainer, and he’s an experienced bright spot among the relatively amateur performers. As the hapless Europol agents, the most capable work is done by… Oh who cares.

This movie exists for neato fighting with ninjas and the main problem with the proceedings is that we barely get any of that. The money shots in the bloody, gory action sequences come within the first five minutes. We see bloody limbs falls spurting to the ground as sharp sword-steel flashes, shurikens (ninja stars) soar through the air with the velocity of bullets, and one poor bugger’s head in sliced horizontal through the face– the top half lands with a splat on the ground, eyes still blinking. After that though, it’s impossible to see a thing going on. Until the final confrontation, everything is filmed in almost complete darkness; most of the combat is seen through the light made through the beams of flashlights or the Mag-Lites mounted on police rifles.

Of course, a certain amount of unbelievable hokum should come with the material, but here, the ridiculousness is jarring. Even the Asian actors insist on mispronouncing Japanese words. The Europol agents collect their leads from video cameras of previous ninja attacks; apparently the art of stealth doesn’t apply to CCTV. And the worst: as the black shadows of the assassins appear while they spider along walls, we hear incomprehensible, but definitely audible, whispering. Since when did these notoriously silent warriors become experiments from the Dharma Initiative on Lost?

Yes, this flick should have been dumb, but just not this dumb. Ninja Assassin puts the “ass” in Assassin. Twice.

Behind the Scenes action training

Because every ninja movie deserves a lego version

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