Ninja Assassin (2009)

The Breath I Take After I Kill You Will Be the First Breath of My Life.

Today’s movie was requested by Christie Moscoscomosco.  Today, her Asianness took control of her and caused this request.  It’s a movie that I’ve seen before and currently own on BluRay, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything in regards to my feelings about it.  I took a gamble with this movie.  I had not seen it when I purchased it.  I looked at the two words that made up the title to the movie and said, “This seems like it’d be for me.”  The first word was right in my wheelhouse, and I’ve looked to try to find a really awesome movie about this group of people that I had not yet found.  And the second word is usually something I’m down for as well.  Do these two great tastes taste great together?  We’ll find out as I review Ninja Assassin, written by Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski, directed by James McTeigue, and starring Rain, Naomie Harris, Sho Kosugi, Anna Sawai, Rick Yune, Ben Miles, Joon Lee, Randall Duk Kim, and Sung Kang.

Orphans are taken in by Lord Ozuna (Sho Kosugi) of the Ozuna Clan of ninja to undergo brutal training to become the world’s deadliest assassins.  One notable orphan is Raizo (Rain), notable because … he’s the hero of the movie, I guess…  Raizo develops a romantic bond with a kunoichi named Kiriko (Anna Sawai), who is far too nice to be a very good ninja.  She attempts to escape the clan despite Raizo’s pleas and is caught and killed by Raizo’s Ozuna brother Takeshi (Rick Yune).  This action loosens Raizo’s bond with his clan, eventually erupting in him trying to kill Lord Ozuna and inflicting heavy casualties on the clan before eventually being injured and left for dead.  In present day, Europol agent Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris) has been investigating political assassinations that she believes leads back to the Ozuna.  Getting too close, the Ozuna send an assassin after her, but Raizo saves her.  Together they will try to … uh … kill a lot of ninjas…?

For all I said about the title of the movie in the first paragraph, it actually made me nervous about the movie.  With a title as bland as Ninja Assassin, your movie will really have to set itself up as pretty spectacular to overcome it.  This movie did not do that.  It’s fine, but it had much less impact on me than a movie about ninjas should have.  I love ninjas!  But this movie was about half martial arts movie, have love story.  It spends a whole lot of time getting us caught up on Raizo’s story and doesn’t actually jump fully into the story of this movie until about halfway in.  I know we need a little bit of backstory, but the movie makes no forward momentum until Raizo gets together with Mika, and even then they don’t move forward very much.  They try to keep us interested in Raizo’s upbringing by mixing it with ninja glory shots of Raizo training with various weapons in his apartment, but you probably could’ve had the same effect by actually making him fight people for a reason than just scenes of “Look what this guy can do with this knife on the end of a string!”  And I have the same question about this movie as I’ve had with similar movies in the past, but what makes Raizo so much better than the hundreds of Ozuna brethren that he slaughters?  He received the same training as them, and they arguably should be better because they continued to train with the clan well after Raizo departed, but the greater majority of them are just blood-filled fodder for him as he hacks his way to either Takeshi or Lord Ozuna, who are the only two people that can make him put in any effort.  But I guess I can’t really judge as I’m the one who’s so immature that I saw a German sign in the movie that said “Ausfahrt” and I started to giggle.

So there really wasn’t much to the story of this movie, but I can’t imagine they were trying that hard.  This movie really does feel like it was written after they had already filmed the action scenes and were told they needed to hold that together with a story.  But even the action is kind of disappointing.  A lot of it is solid, and most of it tended towards being very stylized, but with as weak a story as this movie had, it really should’ve had a lot more spectacular action.  I guess part of the problem was that they seemed really intent on showing how cool the ninja ability to disappear into the shadows and be cloaked in darkness was.  This is something that needs to come along with a ninja movie, but the problem is that if you’re doing it well, the audience probably can’t see most of what’s going on.  Like the scene when Mika is trying to see Raizo and another ninja fighting in an apartment, and she keeps trying to get the flashlight on them to see what’s happening but can only catch glimpses of what is probably an epic battle.  I imagine this is what two ninja fighting would look like, but I have to use my imagination because the movie isn’t showing me anything.  When you could see, the martial arts were never really all that impressive and they seemed to rely more on gore, which they had a lot of.  Lots of CG red paint and body parts flying around in this movie, but only about two fights in the movie seemed like anything cool was happening.  I liked most of the final fight, especially the part where it’s shown in silhouettes through a paper wall that occasionally got splattered with red blood, but that fight’s ending was boring.  They had this big martial arts duel until Raizo got upset about something, then he just disappears and a black shadow makes the other guy’s body parts fall off.  Then it’s just over.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the performances in this movie.  They were fine.  They didn’t blow any minds, but that probably would’ve been a waste of time when there were some more buckets of blood to fling at the screen.  Rain did a fairly good job in the movie.  At first I was just thinking that he was going to have a really hard time pulling off “badass” and “intimidating” when he was so gangnamed pretty, but I think he did as much as he could.  Sho Kosugi did plenty enough badass and intimidating for the both of them, so I wasn’t really worried about it.  Naomie Harris didn’t bring anything to mind in regards to her performance, but I did spend a lot of time trying to figure out why she looked familiar when I watched the movie the first time.  I eventually figured out that it was because she played Tia Dalma in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.  Then I spent the rest of the movie trying to figure out how she looked so much hotter to me when she looked dirty, sweaty, and had really bad teeth in the Pirates movies than she did as just a normal, pretty girl.  Then I realized that I have mental issues and I moved on with my day.

When the name of your movie is as boring as Ninja Assassin, you really need to bring it in the action department.  No one is going into your movie with high hopes about story and performances, but that action must be top notch.  And when I refer to top notch action, I don’t mean a couple of decent fights and lots of fake blood thrown around the set.  It’s the difference between a “Scary Movie” and a “Slasher Film”.  One actually intimidates the audience with suspense; the other just makes the audience queasy with lots of red corn syrup.  Altogether this movie was okay and maybe worth a rental if you’re in the mood, but there are better ways to spend your time.  You can skip it.  Ninja Assassin gets “Weakness compels strength.  Betrayal begets blood” out of “I’ll tattoo the ceiling with your fucking brains!”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

You Always Told Me to Stay Off the Freeway

By now, I think most people have the feeling that the first Matrix movie was fantastic.  And, as with most fantastic things, the studio tried to capitalize on its popularity by cranking out a couple of sequels that sucked.  Going into today’s movie, I remember only that the series deflated me in the sequels, but I don’t really remember which one was the greater cause of it or why.  Because it was requested by Samrizon, because it continues the series, and because I can’t remember if I liked it or not, let’s check out my review of The Matrix Reloaded, written and directed by Andy and Larry (Lana) Wachowski, and starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving, Harry J. Lennix, Anthony Zerbe, Jada Pinkett Smith, Gloria Foster, Randall Duk Kim, Lambert Wilson, Helmut Bakaitis, Harold Perrineau Jr., Nona Gaye, Daniel Bernhardt, and Monica Bellucci.

Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) has come across some information that a group of robotic Sentinels are tunneling towards the last remaining human city, Zion.  Commander Lock (Harry J. Lennix), commander of Zion’s military, orders all ships to return to Zion to defend it.  Morpheus asks another ship to wait around to get a message from the Oracle (Gloria Foster).  They do, and Morpheus takes his ship, the Nebuchadnezzar (which I only include because I like typing that word), back into the matrix so that Neo (Keanu Reeves) can contact her.  He does, but is immediately attacked by Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), who was freed from the control of the matrix and is now trying to replicate himself into everyone in the matrix.  With the information received from the Oracle, Neo must battle his way through hordes of enemies, risk his life and the lives of his loved ones, and cost people their lives, all in order to get into a big room full of televisions and talk to a bearded jerk with a superiority complex.

By the time this movie came out, it suffered from the same problem that the first Matrix movie suffers from when watching it today: when it’s no longer innovative and impressive, it must rely too heavily on a story that’s not super impressive.  It’s fine enough, but it had the tendency to get a little talkie, which was a problem since about half of the dialogue was made terribly annoying by the fact that the Wachowski Brothers used the check from the first Matrix money to invest in a Thesaurus.  Especially the Architect.  The vernacular utilized by that gentleman was quite feasibly the most irksome and befuddling thing to attempt to cognize.  You had to virtually pick and choose the word you could fathom and try to formulate something comprehensible out of it.  Thank you, Thesaurus.  There was a little bit of love story in the first movie, but it was a lot heavier in this one, and I don’t really think it’s the Wachowski’s strong point.  For an example of this, I would harken back to the scene when Link was returning home to his wife Zee and was apparently about to enter the house and yell, “Where’s my pussy?!” until he realized that there were kids in the room.  Seriously, he walks in and gets out, “Where’s my puss…” before he sees them.  Is this how we’re supposed to do it, Ladies?  I’m going to get a girlfriend so I can introduce her as “the irrelevant skin and tissue that connects the boobs and the vag.”  They’re much better when it comes to scenes like the dialogue between Morpheus and Commander Lock.  That dialogue was thick with “Fuck you, I’m smarter than you” from Morpheus.  The Wachowski’s also begin to show themselves to be a little pervy, like the part where the Merovingian has randomly put the programming equivalent of Spanish Fly into a girl’s cake so that the Wachowski’s can vaguely mask their desire to zoom in on a computer code version of a lady’s vagina with some nonsense dialogue about causality.  But then perversion and the Merovingian came together for a good line that Persephone dropped about the lipstick that wasn’t on his face.  It’s so hard to tell where to stand with these Wachowski’s.

The action was sublime in this movie.  If they were going to teach a class about action sequences, they would show the freeway battle scene.  It’s spectacle at its best, and mostly done practically if I remember correctly.  There was some CG, but mostly it was just cars getting fucked up.  The movie also jumps right into some decent action, although it turns out to be a bit of a fuck you because it’s a dream sequence.  It also adds to my idea that people suck at shooting in the matrix.  Trinity’s falling out of a window and an Agent is falling right after her.  She’s unloading uzi’s at him and he probably can’t dodge very much in midair, but neither one of them can hit anything.  A single bullet out of the entire barrage connects.  They also had some pretty good hand to hand combat scenes, like Neo and the Merovingian’s henchmen.  The movie still looks pretty amazing, but it has a couple of faults with some of the CG.  I remember there being some pretty awful face replacement and fakey looking computer generated people, mostly surrounding the multiple Agent Smiths in the big fight on the playground.  There’s also an icky, sweaty-looking dance/Neo and Trinity fucking sequence that goes on a little long, but at least everyone in the dance sequence has their nipples out.  I also want to believe that the one guy that jumps really high out of the crowd was just doing that so he could be on camera.  I also liked the idea, and the execution, of the Keymaker’s skillset, turning a broom closet into a mansion foyer.  And the best thing about the look of the movie was that epic urinal in the Merovingian’s restaurant.  It was a waterfall!  I’d pee all over that!

The performances were roughly unchanged from the previous movie.  I think I might’ve liked Keanu Reeves a little less in this movie.  He still seems like a mixture of Ted from Bill & Ted and Johnny Utah from Point Break.  But this time around, he’s the savior of the world from the first moment.  He wasn’t all cocky about it, but you’d like to think the world was not in his hands.  Carrie-Anne Moss still looks lezzie and Laurence Fishburne is still spooky, but he pulls out a lot more rousing speeches this time around.  We’re also introduced to Jada Pinkett Smith’s Niobe character, which made little to no impact on me.  I found myself slightly irritated with Hugo Weaving in this movie, but it was more the fault of the writing that he kept saying stupid things when talking with his clones.  And thank the good lord up above for the inclusion of Monica Bellucci.  She didn’t do very much in the movie, but Gundamn is she good looking.  I like to think that Keanu slipped a chunk of change to the Wachowski’s to add a random scene where she wanted him to kiss her for no good reason, just so he could stop kissing the lezzie for a while.  And it was fun for me that they added Daniel Bernhardt to the movie as one of the Agents.  I think we all remember his debut performance in Future War (MST3k movie.  Check it out).

Not nearly as impressive and innovative as its predecessor, but still an enjoyable watch in its own right.  The Matrix Reloaded can spend a little too much time talking for my taste, but the action that the dialogue is filling the space between is worth the wait, especially in the freeway scene.  I definitely think Reloaded does a passable job of holding a candle for The Matrix, even though it has a cliffhanger on a movie that’s kept separate from its resolution by almost a year.  But I won’t have to wait that long because I’m reviewing it tomorrow.  For now, The Matrix Reloaded gets “This is Zion, and we are not afraid!” out of “I just love you too damn much.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.