Review of Ninja (2009) by Aaron W — 12 Mar 2012

While reading a user review of Assassination Games I wondered who in the world was Scott Adkins. So I went to Simon who works at a local video store and he gave me this stupid mess of a movie starring Scott Adkins.

Ninja is about a westerner named Casey (Adkins), studying Ninjutsu in Japan, is asked by the Sensei to return to New York to protect the legendary Yoroi Bitsu, an ard chest that contains the weapons of the last Koga Ninja. Do I have to tell you that the story is bad, the title has Ninja in it. A majority of the time if the movie has the word Ninja in it it's going to be bad. It has it shares of pointless violence and dumb moments. I like it how evil Ninja needs night-vision-goggle to see in the dark even though the other characters could see just fine without them and it's never really that dark in the movie. My favorite dumb moment is when the Ninja fights his old Sensei in a temple and our Ninja cuts out the light. This leaves the Sensei unable to find the Ninja even though the temple is not really that dark and the Ninja is in front of him.

So clearly I found the story to be stupid and pointless, which is a shame when you actually have solid action scenes. Now these are some impressive action scenes, but it's pointless and mindless as we're never given a solid reason to get behind it. It adds no tension to the action and it comes tired when the movie has a ton of them. The acting on the other hand, is almost deserving of a Razzie nomination. Scott Adkins especially, he's not interesting as a leading actor and he's not really entertaining when he's not fighting anyone. Though to date this movie has probably the best looking Ninja suit to date and it's not the cliche Ninja suit we're use to seeing.

So what we got left is a movie with a boring leading actor when he's not in action mode, a poorly told story, and really bad acting. Now I could understand the appeal to Adkins from watching this movie as he really does some impressive action scenes, unfortunately he just doesn't have the acting skills for me to be a fan.