Ninja Assassin (2009)

Ninja Assassin arrived in 2009 with the Wachowskis producing, James McTeigue directing, and a Korean pop star named Rain cutting a swath through Berlin and the mountains beyond. It concerns a secret clan of orphans trained into lethal instruments and rented out to wealthy clients at one hundred pounds of gold per head. The blood leaves the human body in geysers. Critics at the time were unimpressed, and the intervening years have not improved the matter. This is a revenge picture with a body count and no thesis.

The casting merits a modest note. The ensemble is overwhelmingly Asian and Asian-diasporic, from Rain and Rick Yune to Sho Kosugi and Sung Kang, with Naomie Harris as a Europol analyst who drives the investigation, defies her superior, and hauls Raizo out of more than one fire. This is organic to a ninja film. Nobody stands around making a speech about it. Harris's Mika Coretti shows more initiative than the genre usually permits a woman, though the screenplay still parks her in a motel room and eventually a hospital bed. The clan's habit of selling death to the rich gestures at something, and the film never follows the thought anywhere.

Everything else is absent. No queer characters. No engagement with race as a subject, only as a question of who can throw a kusarigama. No climate. No body acceptance. No neurodivergence. No revised history, since the history is invented outright. And no lecturing whatsoever, which may be the film's single most endearing quality. It wants to show us a man killing his way toward freedom, and it does so with a straight face and a great deal of corn syrup. For a taxonomy of contemporary social consciousness, there is almost nothing to catalog. The sommelier swirls the glass, finds blood, and sets it down.