Ninja Assassin: Isn't That Kind Of Like Saying Overweight Fat Guy?

I was fairly confident from the title of the film that I knew what I was getting into, a martial arts flick with not a lot of effort wasted on the story. That statement is more or less true, but it really doesn't prepare you for the experience.

Right with the first opening scene, you're treated to an overwhelming amount of gore, just as much as you'd find in the typical slasher horror flick. To further confuse you, the martial arts scenes are mostly "augmented" with CG weapons, blood, motion blur, and Matrix-esque slow motion segments.

Truly the level of ridiculousness present is more akin to something you'd find in an anime. You've got people that move so fast that they disappear, can heal mortal wounds and throw throwing stars with the same rate of fire and velocity as submachine gun rounds.

The story was ultimately bland and cliched, although the acting and writing weren't particularly terrible, just nothing we haven't seen in a hundred movies before.

Bottom line, if you wondered what you'd get if you crossed the Matrix, Kill Bill, and a Hong Kong kung fu flick, this is for you. If you're squeamish about blood, or overly hung up on story elements, keep walking.

Comments

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week. While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but...

Y: The Last Man: Even Spambots Cry After Reading It

Right off the bat, I'm going to say that Y is the saddest story I have ever taken in, with an emotional punch like a locomotive (or a bomb if you will). No work of fiction has ever destroyed me emotionally like this has. That being said, the story may be a tragedy, but gettin there was a lot of fun. The story starts off with every male mammal on the face of the Earth being almost simultaneously wiped out by some kind of illness. With the exception of English major/escape artist Yorick Brown, and Ampersand, a capuchin monkey that he's volunteered to train to help people with disabilities. There's no apparent reason as to why they survived, they just did. At the time the plague hit, Yorick's girlfriend, whom he was about to propose to, was on a trip in Australia, while he was in Chicago. Naturally he sets out to find his true love. Along the way he picks up the companions 355, an agent of a secret government organization called the Culper Ring, and Dr. Allison Man...

Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

This appears to be a time for disappointing sequels, although for awhile there, we got a lot of top tier extremely competent sequels. I guess no trend can be permanent. The first Boondock Saints was one of those rare creations that had just about the optimal amount of everything, it was balanced between being believable, ridiculous, funny, and brutal. Balanced is the last word I would use to describe the sequel. The dialogue is terrible, just about everyone in the movie talks like a middle school bully. There are honest to goodness slapstick comedy moments, such as a mafia liutenant getting smacked in the face with a salami, and then a follow up seen where he's forced to wear headgear and can't speak properly. The tone of the entire movie is just so very different from the original, that it feels like it was made with a different director/writer, with a different vision for what the movie should be. All the more sad, since it's the same writer/director, Troy Duffy,...

Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

Search This Blog