This movie has a bit too much explicit blood & gore squirting around – they must have spent a lot of money on red paint. It’s got a bit of a sadistic side.
The script is intermittent with interesting bits interwoven with boring bits. There’s plenty of gritty and monotonous action mixed in with the more exciting bits. There’s a lot of decent action still, and it’s a fascinating basic concept. Some of the mood setting / atmosphere building is really top level, but there’s plenty of cold, dull & dry patches too, so it’s likely to receive mixed reviews and overall I rate it as Pretty Good and on a similar level to Scott Adkins’ movie Ninja which came out in the same year (2009).
The main Ninja in this movie, Ninja Assassins, is played by Jung Ji-Hoon, a South Korean pop star also known as Rain. He plays a good guy who left a nasty clan of assassins. He befriends a detective played by Naomie Harris. They both do a decent job in this movie – not top-level acting, a bit cold & dry at times, but quite fitting at other times – far from terrible acting – they both did alright. There’s also a decent supporting performance by Ben Miles as Naomie’s colleague in the agency, and a fair performance by Sho Kosugi as the leader of the Ninja Assassin clan.
This movie was produced by the Wachowski brothers (as they were known in 2009, although they prefer to be called sisters now). This is the same duo behind The Matrix, as well as V For Vendetta and Jupiter Ascending – hence the awesome special effects in places, the respectable cast members, and the dodgy innuendos (kidnapping children and torturing them to breed heartless obedient assassins).
There’s a lot of blade fighting in this movie – from swords to throwing stars to knives attached to chains. But the combat techniques are rarely clear – there’s a lot of flashing between camera angles, and loud music, and unclear tricking in low light, probably to mask the fact the lead actor is not well trained in martial art in real life. Jung Ji-Hoon said, for this movie, he trained several hours a day for six months straight. He learnt bits of all sorts of martial arts, including generic Kickboxing, Karate, Kung Fu, Tai Chi, TKD, and specifically for this movie, a lot of Ninjutsu work, especially weapons work – especially the Shuriken (Throwing Star) and Kusarigama (Dagger Chains). But he was still a relative novice, so the stuntmen looked after him well.
The ending is decent, with special forces bursting into the ninja school before they kill the main man; then he fights his main rivals back to back – the ‘older brother’ (the fellow ninja who happily killed his girlfriend according to clan policy) followed by the teacher of the clan.