Ninja – 2009

Ninja from 2009 feels to me like a story that has been told and retold already. Basically, there’s this American Guy, who was taken care of by a Japanese Dojo, och School, or whatever you like to call it. He’s more or less been orphaned and becomes like a son to the owner/father figure of the story. There’s also the Japanese man who also feels like a son but falls into disgrace and is eventually banned from the school. This creates a schism between the two men and one of them turns out to be a bad guy, an assassin, while the other remains as good as they come. Pretty easy premise right? I don’t know how many of these tales there are out there but I have seen a few, The Octagon might be the most known one.

Ninja has a lot of fighting scenes in it. It is an action movie after all. But it hasn’t much else to show for it. But I think that’s kind of enough. That’s about what I want from a movie like this. There are attempts to involve a love story in there but they shouldn’t have bothered. I don’t think anyone cares about that anyway. I would be more interested if they explored the mystical aspects of it. If they were to go more in-depth on the old mythic weaponry that plays a central part. I really like it when a Ninja is portrayed as something with superhuman abilities.

Cool and Ridiculous

It’s both cool and ridiculous to see hi-tech equipment used in a Ninja film. And by High tech I mean when Ninjas use them instead of their natural abilities. A Ninja shouldn’t use infrared goggles to see in the dark. That’s just wrong to me. But, as I said, the other part of me thinks that it looks cool and you certainly donät have a problem seeing who is who when it comes down to the end fight.

Overall a pretty entertaining film but I felt like I’d seen it a few times before but with other actors and so forth. Oh, and there’s a secret society the marks its members with a hot iron rod! Nice!