Ninja Assassin

What do young people in our age want from their cinema? I should think that they want, following the strictures of contemporary cultural theory, a rage of profane or destructive excitements without any clarifying discourse, any programmatic investment, or any demands placed on them or by them other than that the odd semi-coherent orgy of vandalism be played out on the inert flesh of the world. I should think, then, that the people who made it are way more right than the critics who deplore it: the people have spoken and what they want is Ninja Assassin. And you know what? I’m perfectly OK with that. Have we not learned the lesson taught by the Marquis de Sade? That when the social contract is on its last legs all that is left to do is unmask the true, comically sick sublimated desires beneath – debauchery, perversion, crime. We are living in a culture of gore born out of the end of a dead-ended era of Empire, just as the maniacal Marquis was is his pre-revolutionary aristocratic cell, returning the social contract’s repressed self to itself in the form of its sickest, most immanent phantasies. What do the dreams of our children look like? They look like full-immersion Grand Theft Auto. And Ninja Assassin, w/ its Korean pop star practicing a Japanese martial art in an explicitly Americanized global context (Berlin and Japan are interchangeable, everybody speaks English), not only indulges our appetites, shares our dreams, and enacts an ideal psychotic fantasy, it also suggests a radical superman for tomorrow, leaping forward from the Jason Bourne franchise, and demanding that we imagine this future man as possessed of total sensorial discipline and control. A man who has not only honed the eighteen disciplines of ninjitsu, but who has fully tapped into the emergent plane of the immanent, who hears the thoughts of others, who reads the networks of causation in which he is flung like sentient dice, always ready for the playing out of the inevitable against the vectors of the given, always totally rooted in exact sense-knowledge. This man is all sense sensing itself and total fascist discipline of the flesh. Such is Ninja Assassin’s hero rebel Raizo, as he turns his harnessed powers against the symbolic father, Ozunu, the Mars-like cultivator of the forces of war, assembler and converter of orphans into incontrovertible agents of global death-reach, turns the Americoeuropean war machine against Ozunu’s micowar machine, and releases a torrent of CGI blood that looks something like an endless series of obscure glass-blowing accidents. Of course Raizo will finally defeat Ozuzu by pulling out one of those Mortal Kombat secret moves that require the dexterous pushing of a number of buttons in precise succession. Yes, the people have spoken. I await Ninja Assassin II w/ bated breath.