Movie Review : Ninja : Shadow of a Tear (2013)

Ninja : Shadow of a Tear is the follow-up to 2009's Ninja. Scott Adkins is back as Casey, after a trip to the dark side in Expendables 2. He picks up from where he left off in 2009, having married Namiko and leading an peaceful life as the sensei of the dojo he inherited from his father-in-law.

But bad things happen to good people and one night poor Namiko is brutally murdered. Inconsolable Casey is on the warpath. This will see him rampage through three different countries, bring down innumerable bad guys with his bare hands and lay waste to bars, jungles and dojos as he tracks down the villain who destroyed his life.

The screenplay does require one to leave one's thinking cap at home but it is all in good fun. For the most part, the movie plays like the average revenge flick but there is a cool climax that really spices up the story and is a bit of a pleasant surprise.

Regular readers of this blog (both of you) will know of my legendary distaste for wirework. Wirework creates unnatural situations that subvert law of gravity and take away from the beauty of the fight. The mark of a hero is to conform to the laws of physics and prevail against a zillion bad guys.  A ninny flying around, kicking at the air can never convey the raw power of a real kick as the foot pounds flesh or properly display the crushing impact of falling over furniture or being hit by sundry objects and weapons. No sir, not cool.

So I am happy to announce, that Scott Adkins is a real hero - or he fights like one. Given the low budget, there are no trick shots or CGI, just plain, old fashioned action. He seems have to performed nearly all of the fight scenes and stunts and that includes plenty of flying kicks, 360 degree flip kicks, fistfights, knife fights, swordplay and bone jarring falls. There is a cool scene where he pummels 5-6 guys in the room, shot in a single take.  He is not a guy you want to meet in a a dark alley as two unfortunate goons find out. He is not a guy you torture with hot irons and lock up in a prison cell - as the prison warden finds out. You don't give Scott Adkins a bunch of ninja paraphernalia and grenades and then expect a tea party. Even his friends are not spared a royal smacking when he gets angry.

The performances are tolerable. Scott Adkins doesn't really have much time to emote, which is a blessing because a thespian he is not. His emote-o-meter maxes out at the identical disconsolate, pained look he sported in Assassination Games - and lucked out again with his on-screen spouse. Shun Sugata puts in a sinister performance as the drug lord Goro and Kane Kosugi proves himself to be a formidable fighter in his own right.

In all, a good action movie, well worth a watch. One hopes that one doesn't have to wait for four more years for the next Ninja flick.

Movie Review : Tales from the Dark 1 (2013)

Tales from the Dark 1

Tales from the Dark 1 is a compilation of 3 horror stories - all by author Lillian Lee, filmed by three different directors. The 3 films are unrelated to each other and are jarringly different in their approach to their subject matter.

The first deals with an eccentric, middle-aged man who cant hold down a job and resorts to stealing  funeral urns and ransoming them to the  families of the deceased.  This marks the directorial debut of actor Simon Yam, who also plays the eccentric. This film is the weakest of the lot with plenty of pretentious imagery and random ghosts that contribute zilch to the story. Think irrelevant visuals of little girls wandering around and crying, a gluttonous ghost who wont or cant stop eating, an elderly grandmother talking to these other ghosts and so on - similar to some of the visuals in 'Thir13en Ghosts'.

The second film deals with a psychic played by Tony Leung and a fortune teller played by Kelly Chen who team up to exorcise the vengeful ghost of a schoolgirl. This one is straight forward, light-hearted and more 'traditional' than the first movie. It also has a decent back-story for the ghost, allowing us to sympathise with her. Some portions are annoyingly contrived though - especially the sequence revolving around the psychic and his son's CD.

The last film deals with another bitter ghost trying to exact revenge on an elderly lady. It starts off with an affluent woman who comes to a 'villain basher' - a person who places a curse on her clients' chosen victims and symbolically 'beats' photos or images representing said victims in exchange for money. Then the story of this woman is abandoned as another young girl approaches the villain basher - a good performance by Susan Shaw -and the story turns into a violent, revenge tale. This film is the most stylish of the three but suffers from a thin storyline that is unnecessarily padded out.

The movie relies too much on filler material to stretch its running time and is not a horror movie at all - zero scares. It is just a set of sad stories where the antagonists happen to be ghosts. Fans of horror movies will be sorely disappointed and most movie-goers should be puzzled as to why this was made into a motion picture instead of a TV series.

There is a companion piece - Tales from the Dark 2 - released a couple of months after the first one; if the entertainment provided by the first is any indicator of what can be expected from the second, one will err on the safe side by skipping them both.

Can avoid.

Movie Review : Metpo / Metro (2013)

On the heels of 'A Good Day to Die Hard', that features a super-cool chase sequence in Moscow, comes the Russian disaster movie Metro, directed by Anton Megerdichev. Here the action shifts underground to the subway, where passenger lives are threatened when a crack develops in the subway tunnel and the river starts flooding it. The unlucky few trapped in the tunnel must rely on their wits and each other to escape.

One bright, cheerful day, the unsuspecting passengers of the underground train find the trains shutting down, threatened by water from the Moskva River leaking into the tunnels. The trains crash and the people make a run for it. But electric rails and water make for an unfortunate combination and only the few passengers that stayed behind in the carriages are spared this grisly end. The motley group that survives trudges through miles and miles of underground railroads trying to find an opening to the surface. Meanwhile tragedy after tragedy strikes the group as well as the rescue teams and both are running out of time and ideas for survival and escape.

The movie doesn't start as abruptly. There is an introduction to the main characters ; a doctor, his daughter and his wife's lover who are (surprise, surprise) all on the same train in the same carriage. The wife is on the brink of divorcing her dull husband for the dashing businessman because he spends too much time saving people's lives and is not making enough money. On this fateful day, she is not on the train and we have to watch her run around Moscow in high heels, wracked with guilt and remorse, looking for her loved ones.

For the younger viewers, there is a sweet love story that blossoms between a young girl and boy as they keep saving each other lives while trying to escape the tunnel. An eccentric hippie woman and an overweight accountant are the other survivors, the former is annoying and the latter doesn't get to do much. The emotional elements introduced don't really do much for the story, but provide a breather from the relentless disasters striking the hapless Muscovites. I watched the movie with a terrible set of subtitles but the slick pace and good performances from the cast ensured that I did not miss too much of the plot - the story is simple enough to follow. The tension never really lets up and even while we know enough to expect a happy ending, there is an ever present undercurrent that suggests the characters are doomed.

This is a complete entertainer. It is very evident that a lot of talent was involved in making this a technically sound, interesting and neatly packaged product and one looks forward to even more entertainers from the land of matryoshka dolls and samovars.

There is a very good chance that even though you thoroughly enjoy the movie, once you step out of the theatre you would be at a loss to recall specific elements of the story. Yet definitely worth a watch even if it makes one nervous about using the Moscow subway.