YES! Today, is Ninja Day, my friends! Finally, I wait all year to don the black pajamas and stalk around my neighborhood without getting arrested. The time is nigh!!
Yesterday, I talked about what makes a bad ass ninja, BAD ASS. Today, I’m going to talk about ninjas and the movies. There has been a long history of US ninja movies, but those have MOSTLY died out here in the US since the late ’80s. I loved all of those movies, roughly 90% of which starred the awesome, Sho Kosugi. However, despite some fairly recent movies having ninjas in them (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Elektra) there haven’t really been any ninja-centric movies in the last few years. This past Thanksgiving changed that trend with the release of the movie, Ninja Assassin. In honor of Ninja Day, I saw this movie and would like to review it.
So, the movie opens up with a pretty intense scene. You see these young Asian “gangster” types hanging out in their hideout playing pool and drinking. The leader is getting a tattoo and complaining about the needle hurting and being kind of a bitch about it. The crusty old dude giving the tattoo essentially says, maybe you aren’t man enough to get this tattoo. The young Asian leader of course pulls this ridiculously large pistol (fully plated in gold, mind you) and threatens to paint the ceiling with the crusty old guy’s brains. At this point, even people from space can see where this is headed. And after the delivery of a wax sealed envelope filled with black sand, every single one of the young toughs are systematically slaughtered in the most intensely violent ways. The first guy literally has half his head torn off by a blade flying so fast you only see the blur. And that’s how everyone else dies. You see mostly the dark blurs (ninja) and silvery blurs (ninja stars) as they reduce everyone in the room to a bloody pile of limbs. It’s fast, violent and every bit as balls out awesome as you think it’s going to be.
Cavalcade of Awesome 