#ENTER THE NINJA MOVIE MOVIE#
The lack of actors whom American audiences will recognize adds to the ?B' movie flavor. (If "Ninja Assassin" and "Saw VI," to name two recent examples, qualify for an R rating, what is the purpose of NC-17?) The bloodletting is relentless but mostly digitally animated and thus cartoonish, even when heads are sliced in half, torsos are bisected and men are gutted like fish. To its credit, "Ninja Assassin" dispenses almost entirely with romance and other story elements to focus on nonstop mayhem, too frequently staged and edited with the chaos of a Jason Bourne adventure rather than the violence-as-performance elegance of a Shaw Brothers epic.
Commandos!" is just one of the colorful phrases that might have been splashed on the movie's poster if this were the good old days of exploitation.
#ENTER THE NINJA MOVIE UPDATE#
"Ninja Assassin" was directed by James McTeigue ("V for Vendetta") and produced by some of Hollywood's wealthiest cheesemongers, including Joel Silver ("Lethal Weapon") and the Wachowski Brothers ("The Matrix"), but it never tries to be anything but a slick update of the cheap martial arts thrillers distributed by Cannon Films in the 1980s. Action fans won't mind, because, yes, Virginia, there is an exuberantly absurd ?B' movie in theaters this holiday weekend, and it's spurting enough blood to substitute for all the gravy that will be poured on mashed potatoes in Memphis through Christmas.
That's OK, because logic has no more place in "Ninja Assassin" than does Santa Claus. One of their targets is a "forensic researcher" (Naomie Harris) whose car is hit by so many stars it looks like a map of the Milky Way of course, none of the weapons thrown by these allegedly expert marksmen actually punctures the car's tires. Three stars for the ultra-bloody "Ninja Assassin"? That's nothing compared to the number of stars in the film itself ? lethal shuriken stars, those pointy weapons that the martial artists in this movie hurl as blithely as guests tossing rice at a wedding.
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