Review of Ninja (2009) by Allan C — 03 Sep 2015

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this film going in. Was it going to be a low budget version of the Wachowski Brother produced "Ninja Assassin" or was it going to be more like a cheesy Menahem Golan/Yoram Globus "Revenge of the Ninja" type of flick.

This film seemed to fall somewhere in between. The story is a super corny one about an American ninja, Scott Adkins, sent back to New York from Japan to protect a sacred sword, which a bunch of bad ninjas want.

As you might expect, this leads to lots of throwing stars and ninja fights. For a low budget film the fights aren't too bad and and the film does have an enjoyable cartoony feel that reminded me somewhat of "Darkman," though in terms of quaintly it's probably more akin to Darkman II and III.

I went into this film expecting to ironically enjoy bad filmmaking in a disreputable and out-of-date sub-genre, but it ended up being an fairly entreating and surprisingly competently made. The start of the film was a bit dull and did seem more like the bad Michael Dudikoff-type of film I was expecting, but it ended up being better than I thought.

Not a great film, but I'd go as far as to say it was almost good and probably worth watching for fans of ninja films.