http://ninja-assassin-movie.warnerbros.com/

Oh man it was looking all right until the CG blades started flying around. =P

I was amused by the shot of the car with like 50 shuriken embedded in the hood, though.

Too late to drop out now. :p

It looks pretty neat... but I would have prefered a non-modern setting.

Man, thanks for reminding me! I still have to make the MMO version!

Just don't kill off the cool mentor ninja three months in.

(And yes, I know that wasn't your idea.)

MTV Exclusive clip:

http://www.mtv.com/videos/movies/434395/ninja-assassin-exclusive-clip.jhtml

Even ninjas can't evade shaky-cam!

I have the same problem with this that I do with a lot of action films these days: the choreography, camerawork and editing are trying to hard to be in-your-face and fast fast fast, and it just isn't fun to try to follow what's going on. Like, you could have had this scene in an old Hong Kong action film, but everything would have been much clearer and easy to follow, and without obvious camera/CG trickery. There are also some bits here that just seem off, like glass breaking on the van he lands on at the beginning well after he's hit it, a ninja doing an ornate rolling flip off a car, only to land clumsily in two gratuitous split-second shots, and the hero kicking (?) an oncoming car to stop himself. Say wha? And the actual fighting doesn't show any particular kind of martial arts knowledge, just thrashing around and swinging at each others' swords.

Not that I can point to any western-produced movies that did a better job at emulating traditional eastern martial arts action, though! Oh well a couple bits in the Matrix I guess. :D

What happened to the Wachowskis?! Their style used to be so... smooth. I *hate* shaky-cam with a passion. And you're right about old Hong Kong action - I recently re-watched Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and both Drunken Masters for the first time in several years. I forgot how amazing their choreography and editing were.

Ben, both Kill Bill movies emulate that style very well, what with being tributes to the genre. If you haven't seen them before, see if they're available for your Japanese PS3 - the versions released there are slightly longer and feature some alternate angles, and so forth.

I've actually been thinking about checking them out on PSN, since I just saw Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (or however it's intentionally misspelled) , and enjoyed the direction a lot, despite the not-so-great plot. I've liked all the films of his that I've seen, but had always avoided the Kill Bill movies, having got the impression from the trailers that they were anime-wannabe gore fests or something, and not being impressed by what I saw of Uma as an action samurai--and my brother constantly urging them on me probably didn't help. ;D But yeah I'm starting to think there will probably be enough of what I like about Tarantino in them to make them worthwhile; I'll have to check them out soon.