Ninja (2009)

Ninja (2009)

 

Starring: Scott Adkins, Miki Ijii, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Togo Igawa
Director: Isaac Florentine
Action Director: Akihiro Noguchi

 

Right about the same, around late 2007 or early 2008, two different ninja movies were announced. The first one was to be produced by the famous Wachowski Sisters (probably “The Wachowskis” at that point) and would be a big-budgeted (or at least medium-budgeted) affair with a well-known (I guess) Korean pop star in the lead role (I haven’t followed K-pop since S.E.S. back in the late 90s—oh Shu, how I miss you). The second one was even more promising, since it was slated to star legendary British superkicker Scott Adkins and would be directed by Isaac Florentine, who gave us some awesome Hong Kong-style fights in films like U.S. Seals 2 and Special Forces, at a time when Hong Kong was having difficulty doing Hong Kong-style fights. Well, both of them came out and it took me a while, but I did watch both of them, albeit at different times. Ninja Assassin, the brainchild of the Wachowskis, was a highly-polished splatterfest produced by a company best known for their horror films with a couple of decent action scenes and a nice return to the big screen by Sho Kosugi. However, mainstream audiences didn’t care and critics and fight fans complained about their being too much CGI and intrusive editing in the fights. Okay, so how did it’s lower-budgeted counterpart fare?

Let’s get that pesky plot out of the way. Casey Bowman (Scott Adkins) is an American who has spent the last 20 years or so learning martial arts at a ninja school in Japan after his mother left the family and his Marine father committed suicide. Casey has trained himself to be the top #2 student, right beind another student named Masazuka. He’s in running to be the next sensei after his master retires, and is also in love with the sensei’s daughter, Namiko. Masazuka has a chip on his shoulder about Casey, not quite so much because he’s a gaijin, but because he’s an orphan, which he finds to be an insulting label to carry around. When the two are asked to duel by their master, Masazuka bests his opponent, but then goes nuts and tries to kill him. Masazuka is expelled from the school and sent out into the world to find his own path.

On the day that the sensei is to announce his successor, Masazuka shows up at the press conference (ninja dojos hold press conferences?) to demand the right to run the school and be given stewardship over an antique box containing the weapons and gear of the last Koga Clan ninja from generations past. So if the bad guys from Machine Girl were descendants of the Koga Clan, and this school can also trace its lineage to the Koga Clan, then I’m severely disappointed that at no point does Namiko put on a drill bra to mutilate her enemies. Worried that Masazuka will steal the box, he sends Casey, Namiko and two other students to transport the box to the United States, where it will be kept inside a safe at a university in New York. While they’re doing that, Masazuka is massacring everybody at the school in search of the box. Upon discovering that it has been moved, he gets in touch with his best clients.

You see, when Masazuka left the school, he decided to become a high-class, high-tech, high-charging assassin. His main client is an industrialist named Temple, who runs his business like a cult and whose Board of Directors claim to be the driving force behind all the governments of the world or something. They also brand their subordinates and have a bunch of hired goons working at their disposal. Temple sends his goons to kill Casey and bring back Namiko to find out where the box is. Lots of fights ensue. When Masazuka himself comes to New York, even more fights ensue.

The film’s story feels like a pastiche of stuff we’ve seen from 80s Ninja films. The main premise feels like an updating of Chuck Norris’s The Octagon, while the inclusion of an evil white businessman and his cronies feels like the stuff we’ve come to know (and maybe love) from the American Ninja series. That said, the whole “business illuminati cult” subplot feels underdeveloped and is mainly an excuse to give our hero some more people to fight, since otherwise there would be only one henchman-less villain for our hero to tango with. However, you have to wonder about the efficiency of an evil illuminati business cult whose lackeys carry fully-automatic assault weapons into public places to carry out hits while bearing the insignia of their organization on their chest. Beyond that, the direction is fine and everything moves at a brisk pace, and Florentine is smart enough to let the actors be their special effects for the most part, aside from some unnecessary CGI sword swishes. In fact, practically everything that was CGI (which isn’t a lot, thankfully), took me out of the film for a brief moment.

There’s more than enough action to take our mind of those plot holes and leaps in logic. I have seen little of Scott Adkins, to be perfectly honest. I’ve seen Undisputed 2, The Expendables 2, and Assassination Games, but probably just those. Does X-Men Origins: Wolverine count as an Adkins movie? I think he did stuntwork for that. Whatever. The point is that here, more than the other things I’ve seen him in, cements his status as a Legendary British Superkicker. His aerial kicks are just awesome and, unlike Dan Chupong’s similar work in Born to Fight, his choreographer—Akihiro Noguchi of Drive and Power Rangers fame—is smart enough to use these flashier moves to break up the simpler and more economical attacks (punches, judo throws, front kicks), instead of making the fights into a slow-motion showreel. I’ve read reviews that have jumped all over the subway fight, I prefer his fight at the evil business cult’s headquarters to be more satisfying.

The aspect of the action that I don’t think I really liked was Miki Ijii. Don’t get me wrong, she’s attractive and does get some decent hits in. She’s just as lethal with a crutch as she is with a bow and arrow, which I have to praise. But man, that woman takes a walloping in this movie. I mean, in at least two fight sequences, the woman will dish out the hurt to one thug, and then suddenly be set upon by two or three more and get whopped down bad. While you have to respect Florentine for following the footsteps of his Hong Kong forbears in treating his actresses just as harshly as the actors (if they are equal enough to deal out the hurt, they are equal enough to take it, too), I didn’t get that catharsis that comes from watching her stand back up to show her male enemies who the real bad a** is. She does okay, but not good enough, considering how much she takes in her fights.

And what about the quality of the ninjitsu daring-do on display? It’s pretty good good, but the door swings both ways. The big flaw in said ninja action is that Adkins doesn’t go all ninja on the bad guys until the final set piece. That’s sort of a flaw that American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt had, in which it felt like a generic karate movie in many of its fights, despite David Bradley having more MA training than Michael Dudikoff. Adkins does wield a mean nunchaku, however. On the flip side, we get quite a bit of violent ninja action from Tsuyoshi Ihara, who plays the villain. Lots of blow guns, katana swinging, ninja stars, and even some tetsubishi thrown in for good measure. When he invades the ninja school about halfway through, he takes on one of the senior instructors who wields a sai (said instructor gives a couple of demonstrations during the mass training scenes at the beginning), which should make those of us who grew up on the TMNT happy. There’s some kusari-kama action during a flashback sequence, although it doesn’t reach the insane and bloody heights that it did in Ninja Assassin. As a ninja movie, Ninja certainly delivers, but it needed a few tweaks in the story and more ninja action from the lead to be a true shinobi classic. For now, it gets a solid recommendation.