The first time I saw a ninja movie – really walked my ass to some establishment and parked my ass down to see a ninja movie – was more than twenty-three years ago. In between then and now I did see American Ninja (1985) (but never saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles [1990] because of a complete lack of interest on my part), but that was on the telly from the comfort of my living room when I had nothing better to do.
This establishment I walked my ass to was the local yellow-painted community centre located behind my parental home and which stood on the far end of the local playground, which in turn stood adjacent a small field of grass bookended by net-less goals. Writing this down I now see what the planners had in mind: a place for parents to take the kids to for some wholesome romping and for some wholesome refreshments afterwards, available at the yellow-painted community centre.
As far as wholesomeness is concerned, I don't think that learning how to blow smoke from your nose behind the bushes that lined one side of the field is particularly wholesome. And as far as parents taking their kids are concerned, there were none. It was pretty much Lord of the Flies. The only adult I remember to have had graced the grounds was an elderly man who would sit on one of the wooden benches that lined one side of the field and watch me and my buddies play football and give the occasional commentary. I think he watched us once, maybe twice, to never be seen again (I like to fancy him to be a football scout of sorts).
If we weren't playing football, we would hang out at the yellow-painted community centre – i.e. during the rare occasion it would open its door. It had no set business hours, which probably was because it hadn't any business to speak of. A local cover band of sorts would occasionally rent the place to practice, and we would watch. And it had a bar, and grown-ups would smoke and drink beer.
It was during one of those rare occasions that it opened its door that I saw the ninja movie. In a rare instance of doing something resembling a community centre, it screened the ninja movie, though I'm not sure it even was for the entertainment of anybody other than the proprietor and his patrons; forget flyers, news was passed by word of mouth. When we got there, someone took out some extra chairs and planted these in front of the grown-ups that were already sitting in front of the TV and VCR. I was a bit apprehensive; the patrons were foreign, i.e. not from the immediate neighbourhood –they never were– and a funky smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke hung in the air, which all added to the experience, but I sensed that we were welcome.
I don't remember much of the movie other than that it involved a sacred samurai sword hidden somewhere in a cave and that while we were watching, grown-ups sitting at the bar behind us were chatting, smoking, and drinking beer. I didn't know any of the Western actors and actresses that were in it, but they don't matter. It was all about the ninjas and their ways of the mysterious. Don't even try to understand the ninjas: they're from the Far East, that's how they do things over there. The video's graininess added to the movie's somewhat forbidding quality. But the medium of video would do that to all kinds of movies, not just ninja movies. Stick a videotape into a VCR and you would enter a world of magic. This was all before the invasion of the Internet, cellphones, and email. It was the age of the Pager. Movie stars were still movie stars.
And so Ninja Assassin is the second ninja movie I saw and, yes, it was like at the yellow-painted community centre, but without the graininess it has lost some of its mystique, even if the fight scenes are dazzling and the bloodletting would put any slasher film to shame.
But here is some word of mouth: go see it.
(Running time: 99 minutes)
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