Pitched somewhere between a preadolescent boy's martial-arts fantasy world and a wildly off-kilter exercise in homoerotic beefcakery, Ninja Assassin is an astonishingly crappy slo-mo gorefest from the V for Vendetta team of director James McTeigue and producers the Wachowski Brothers.
But I'm not sure there's anybody at the helm of Ninja Assassin, which just flat-out sucks, beginning with its generic title on down to its preposterously dumb view of the ups and downs, and bullet-avoidance techniques, of your average contemporary ninja. That would be Korean pop star Rain as Raizo, who was abducted as a child by the not-even-vaguely mysterious Ozuno Clan, and thereafter raised to be unkillable and super-buff.
The convoluted storyline has sexy, Berlin-based Interpol agent Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris) digging up connections between a recent spate of high-profile international assassinations and the Ozunus. Thus both Raizo and Coretti are targeted for death by...oh, seriously, who cares?
Ninja Assassin, awash in a veritable flood of patently fake CG blood - some of which ends up bespotting the "camera," no less - is so unreal it hurts.
