Before you read Josh’s review I’d like to give you a bit of back story. This review is writ­ten in response to Slick’s recent review of Avatar.Slick and Josh have very dif­fer­ent opin­ions and while both are in fact accu­rate assess­ments it’s seems that the read­ers deserve both view­points. Check them both out and share you thoughts in the com­ments below –Rich

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So, the hype has died down for a brief moment and the aver­age moviegoer’s eyes have shrunk back to nor­mal after pre­vi­ously being big­ger than your aver­age anime char­ac­ter or one of these major play­ers in the hit movie: Avatar, which I am going to try to go into depth with a fair opin­ion. From the out­set, I was anti-Avatar, sim­ply because I watched all the pro­mos, I read all the teaser infor­ma­tion and I asked peo­ple who had seen the film and noth­ing made me mildly inter­ested in see­ing it. My lit­eral reac­tion was: It looks like the mechs from the TV show Exo Squad and the HKs and jets from Ter­mi­na­tor and Halo going up against a bunch of elon­gated Smurfs with bug eyes. I finally broke down and saw it because I had to see if there was some redeem­ing value in the film. Well, they are not smurfs: the “Na’vi,” as they are called look more like the char­ac­ter “Spider-Monkey,” from the TV show Ben 10: Alien Force, and they have nearly the same agility level. That is the bad about the movie: almost every­thing in it is derived from some­thing else and the sim­i­lar­i­ties are so bla­tant that it is hard to think that it was a mis­take. How­ever, to be fair, I am going to exam­ine the movie itself before going into my final opinion.

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Ninja Assas­sin in not your aver­age ninja flick.…..with that said, I must say that it was very styl­ish in exe­cu­tion and made no issue in using loads of blood & guts. I watched the trail­ers and looked for rea­sons to really not like this movie. As more infor­ma­tion became avail­able I real­ized the movie looked like a great pop­corn flick. Before I con­tinue my review here is a lit­tle bit about the film:

Raizo (Rain) is one of the world’s dead­liest assas­sins, hav­ing been orphaned as a child and raised by the Ozunu Clan, believed by the world to be a myth. When the love of his life is exe­cuted by the Clan for betrayal, Raizo begins to har­bor resent­ment towards the Clan. When his first offi­cial mis­sion is com­pleted, he is told to exe­cute one of his fel­low mem­bers for the same rea­son his lover died. He rebels against them, nearly dying in the process, and goes into hid­ing, seek­ing revenge on his for­mer Clan. Mean­while, Mika Coretti (Naomie Har­ris) is a Europol agent who inves­ti­gates money linked to polit­i­cal mur­ders and finds that it is linked to the Ozunu Clan. She defies her supe­rior, Ryan Maslow (Ben Miles), and retrieves secret agency files to find out more. The Clan, find­ing out about the inves­ti­ga­tion, attempts to assas­si­nate her, but she is res­cued by Raizo. Hid­ing in Berlin, Raizo and Mika must find a way to take down the Ozunu Clan. Per­ma­nently. Excerpt — Ninja Assas­sin Wikipedia

Ninja Assas­sin is a whirl­wind of ninja stars, blood and guts that in 99 min­utes deliv­ers a sym­phony of vio­lence. I was pleas­antly sur­prised when I found out that Rain was same actor who appeared in Speed Racer. His por­trayal of Raizo was well exe­cuted and kept my inter­est in the char­ac­ter. While some may argue that use of CGI blood was over­done, I per­son­ally felt that it added a cool dynamic and reminded me of the bat­tle between the Bride and the Crazy 88’s in Kill Bill.  I was also sur­prised by the cameo of Sho Kusugi which to me is the father of ninja action movies.

If you are a fan of Kill Bill or the old Shaw Broth­ers mar­tial arts films you will enjoy Ninja Assas­sin. If you decide to watch it, real­ize that this movie is not meant to be an Oscar can­di­date, but it’s a great action flick that will pro­vide a few laughs and a few WTF moments.

My Take : Recommend