Review of Ninja (2009) by Andy N — 07 Jun 2010

Ninja is an entertaining 80s style American martial arts flick, it's made with about the same budget too. The story here is standard ninja movie fare: a bad student appropriately dressed in black doesn't like the good student appropriately dressed in white and tries to kill him.

Sensei who loves bad student, but has to follow the rules, tells him to get out and bad student returns for vengeance on everyone so it's up to good student to kill bad student. Somewhere along the way there's an original ninja box that contains the last ninja's weapons and the bad student wants it.

Good student must take it to New York of all places and hide it at a school. Somewhere, also along the way, there's an oil tycoon who has a cult of Storm Trooper quality cultists. Everyone fights, people die, and police learn yet again that ninjas exist.

O.K., so the oil cult isn't really standard fare, but pretty much everything else is. I actually liked the story of Ninja over Ninja Assassin. Ninja Assassin's appeal though is its fast paced, gory, balls to the wall action and it's super cheese factor.

Ninja's appeal is that, well, which one did you hear of last year? The acting is cheesy, the CGI is laughable, but I will say this, the bad guy's ninja outfit...bad ass. Take Christopher Nolan's Batman and make him a killing machine without a cape or a pointy head.

The costume design was just simply awesome. I wanted the suit to be in a better action movie with a bigger budget and on someone with the talent of the great Tony Jaa (before he went fucking insane). Who watches action movies though for the plot or the acting, I want action in my action movies and Ninja doesn't disappoint.

Scott Adkins, whoever the fuck he is, if he was in a quicker edited martial arts flick...that would be something to pay and see. He can pull off some slick moves without the help of wires. You get to see some acrobatic parkour skills in some set pieces, but the main fight sequence he's best in is toward the end when he's out to find the bad guy.

He stumbles upon the oil tycoon cult and takes on a militia of about 30 dudes. Take any Tony Jaa performance and now take out the bone breaking...the scene was awesome. If the movie had more of this type of scene, showcasing Adkins skills, it would be a way better action movie.

Unfortunately most of the time Adkins takes the flight of the fight or flight approach and you don't really get a whole lot with him-not to mention his character has the awesome ability of Superman, you know the one, where he forgets his fucking powers all the time.

He can kick 30 guys' asses easily, but two or four can keep him held up for a while. If given a bigger budget and a script rewrite that added in just, action scene after action scene, some new, fast editing techniques plus a better fight choreographer, Ninja could easily be an epic action flick.

Unfortunately the craze in Hollywood right now is vampires, so unless someone's got a new ninja/vampire flick to pitch...or a hopeful Ninja Assassin 2...then it's going to be a while before I get another one of my epic ninja movies that I love so much.