Ninja Assassin

Ninja Assassin
by Jose

What’s it about?
A young ninja turns his back on orphanage that raised/trained him, leading to a confrontation with fellow ninja and master from the clan.

Any good?
Who knew that the most insanely violent, ridiculously brutal and psychotically gory film of the year would be Ninja Assassin. It's quite obvious that the people responsible for this film set out to make the most ass kicking Ninja movie and they even one upped themselves.
I remember when I was younger Ninjas were cool. But since than they've lost their flair and so has the martial arts genre in general. Ninja Assassin brings all that back with a hellacious gut punch. I got this same feeling when watching The Forbidden Kingdom. Ninja Assassin and Forbidden Kingdom brought back that special “awesomeness” that one gets when watching old classic martial arts movies from the 80’s and 70’s and earlier.

Visually the film is incredible. It's unlike anything you've ever seen. The fighting is quick, furious and the story although not completely involving is involving enough so that we end up liking the characters. The main character Raizo (played by Rain) is quite the baddass ninja and I look forward in seeing him in future roles. What the film does explosively well is decapitate, disembowel and explode it's victims across it's blood soaked screen. Imagine slow motion shots of a man diving out of the way of 100's of ninja stars, slicing people in half with samurai swords and being born out of shadows literally. Raizo’s main weapon of choice is a Tsubaki Kusarigama. There is not much for me to say about the amount of blood this one type of weapon sheds in this movie; but it is insane once we see it in action. It's an exciting piece of cinematic brilliance.

Final thoughts:

I can't speak for everyone but to me Ninja Assassin was just freaking crazy as hell. A modern ninja/martial arts movie was doomed to fail from the start. I that’s my opinion. Movies like this tend to fail due to lack of support or because Jet Li or Jackie Chan are not starring in it. Ninja Assassin proved to me that there can be a martial arts movie made now that can be great and I can’t wait to see if we can get more of these types of movies in the future.

Rating: 4 out of 5