Ninja (2009)

USA

92 mins.

Directed by Isaac Florentine

Starring: Scott Adkins, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Todd Jensen, Togo Igawa, Mika Hijii

Right off the bat, I had to check to make sure this thing wasn't an Asylum knockoff of Ninja Assassin. Nope. Good to go. Scott Adkins? Alright now I'm interested. He played a very underrated bad guy in the surprisingly good Undisputed II.

After sitting through Isaac Florentine's latest, the highest praise I can heap upon Ninja is that there is absolutely no fat on this thing. It's lean and mean and gets right down to the point. Florentine also directed Undisputed II and Van Damme's The Shepherd, so he's an unspectacular but serviceable action director.

It's a scientific fact that ninjas are way cooler than pirates and robots combined. Even dead people know this to be true. That's why it's hard to even muster the energy to attempt to try to bag on a movie like Ninja. The script is flimsier than a leaf in a hurricane, the dialogue is spotty at best and trying to make sense of every plot detail just outs you as an unpatriotic ninja hater.

What the movie does do well is show you ninjas killing the crap out of everyone on screen. Hero Scott Adkins and villain Tsuyoshi Ihara have a hellacious final duel and everything leading up to it is paced faster than a one hundred yard dash. It uses its hour and a half run time economically and for the first time in months I forgot to check my watch; resulting in a "it's over?" moment from me.

The plot involves white boy orphan Scott Adkins, who's been trained from little-boyhood as a ninja in an isolated ninja commune/dojo/whatever. It's got all the familiar standbys: the wise old master, the bitter rival and the cute love interest who's also spunky and knows some ninjitsu herself. The place (and more specifically the wise old master) guards an ancient cache of ninja gear that is supposed to be so badass that any ninja who wears it can travel through time.

Fine, I made that last part up. But that's what I wanted to happen.

Anyway, the bitter rival does get kicked out of the dojo (naturally) and becomes a crazy assassin for hire with his own high-tech Iron Man version of ninja armor that really puts that chest of old ninja duds to shame. But of course, the bitter rival assassin villain still wants that old box of ninja clothes and weapons and will stop at nothing to get it. Even though he was already living with it for years. I know.

That's... pretty much everything that happens in the movie. It's not too complicated and delivers on decent non-CG martial arts violence. I just couldn't get into Ninja Assassin one hundred percent and the outlandish computer blood was a big sticking point for me. It's fine in 300 but not in something like Ninja Assassin.

Let's be honest, you didn't have any interest in this movie for its stern position on global politics or the humane treatment of thoroughly owned ninja victims. You want to see some hot ninja-on-ninja action. So in that respect, it's way better than Casper Van Dien's cinematic sedative Mask of The Ninja and in my opinion slightly better than Ninja Assassin. It is not, however, better than Chris Lambert's The Hunted. That one is the high water mark for trashy non-Japanese ninja movies.

lMC