There’s always something fun about going to see a film that has received and almost complete critical slamming. There have been one star reviews galore for Ninja Assassin, but I thought I’d go for it anyway. I mean, this is a film from James McTeigue. He. for the uneducated, was assistant director on the Matrix Trilogy, Star Wars Episode 2, and made his directorial debut in 2006 with one of the better film adaptations of a comic book, the unforgettable V for Vendetta.
With my hopes of a resurrection of true narrative cinema gold crushed before I even entered the cinema, and having seen the trailers, I sat ready to be bored to death and be bathed in CGI blood. The second part happened, the first however, didn’t go as I had expected.
Don’t get the wrong end of the stick here, the dialogue is read with the energy of someone reading the telephone directory, the acting is nothing to write home about and what little plot there is won’t really engage you, but this is more of a B-Movie than the $40 million budget implies.
I never liked re-inventing the wheel, and I always love quoting the BBFC, so I’ll give you the synopsis they supply because it sums the film up so perfectly. “NINJA ASSASSIN is an action film about a young ninja seeking revenge on the clan who killed his closest friend.” That’s it, that’s the story. There are Ninjas, they are assassins, there is an assassin, he is a ninja. They fight. That is pretty much the only plot here.
To spice the movie up, however, and in true B-Movie style, you get action. Lots of action. And a lot of blood. How much, well, let’s ask the BBFC:
In NINJA ASSASSIN the violent battles between the main character and the clan he wishes to defeat are frequent and very bloody. Swords, knives, chains and throwing stars are all used to inflict injuries which always result in huge plumes of blood spraying into the air.
These plumes are, indeed, huge, and these battles are exceptionally frequent. I said that the dialogue was clunky and boring, but there isn’t enough of it for that to be a real complaint. The fight scenes are entertaining, in a very B-Movie way, and it comes thick and fast. It’s all a lot of fun, it’s all a bit silly, but it’s what you expect from a film called “Ninja Assassin”.
There is one last thing I would like to quote from the BBFC. Maybe I should start paying them for writing this blog for me. It’s about their classification of this film as an 18.
the BBFC Guidelines also state ‘that adults should, as far as possible, be free to choose what they see, provided that it remains within the law and is not potentially harmful’, and therefore ‘18’ was felt to be the appropriate category.
There was a time in the early 80s, amid the video nasties period, when a film like this would have been banned by the BBFC, but this time is gone, and this is, officially, not a potentially harmful film.
This won’t be winning any awards, it’s never going to score highly with a critical audience, but it’s fun, and that’s what you want from a high-budget B-Movie. That, and it isn’t illegal!
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This content is reposted from the Random Blog of Random Blogginess. The original post can be found here. It is used, with permission, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
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