Review of Ninja Assassin (2009) by Chads — 29 Nov 2009

Mika(Naomie Harris) believes in ninjas, so does Maslow(Ben Miles), her superior(for dramatic purposes, this is a mistake), which must place these two on the fringe of respectability among their Europol colleagues, like a latter-day Mulder and Scully, the FBI agents who investigated the unfathomable.

Talking about the unfathomable, the opening scene of "Ninja Assassin" plays like an X file, as heads are decapitated(and other such bloody mayhem) seemingly out of thin air, so fast is the ninja, he plays more like a ghost than man.

Since a belief in these folktale mainstays can be akin to a belief in the supernatural, the filmmaker should have implemented scenes where the pair, especially Mika, face intense skepticism about her ninja fixation from the Europol brass, especially Maslow.

"Ninja Assassin", of course, has to devote a lot of its running time to the tried and true origin story, but underwriting Mika is a mistake, because she's the story's entry point. When the Europol researcher meets Raizo(Rain), much more ado should be made about this moment from an emotional standpoint.

Instead, at Mika's apartment, the good ninja engages in a heated fight with the bad ninja, so the Brit woman reacts to her impending safety, rather than the excitement that the corporeality of these mythical beings have just validated her life's work.

The moviegoer only gets a sense of Mika's underdog status, during the scene in which an old Russian lady says that the Europol researcher is the only person who took her KGB agent husband's work seriously.

In other words, ninjas are thought to hail from the fictional realm. On a grander scale, "Ninja Assassin" can be construed as an expression of our love affair with Japanese popular culture. In Mika's apartment, east finally meets west, and then they hang out, which should have been a lot more fun than what happens on the screen.

Since a Korean pop star can't be expected to fight like Jet Li, the fight scenes are shot in a near-blackout.