Ninja: Shadow of a Tear (2013)

After the events of Ninja Casey (Scott “Best Western Martial Arts Actor” Adkins) and Namiko (Mika Hijii) have gotten married and are continuing Namiko’s father’s ninjitsu dojo. Now, Namiko is pregnant, and we all know what that spells for women in martial arts movies: death. Consequently, one night while Casey is out indulging Namiko’s pregnant wishes for chocolate and seaweed, someone murders her.

Casey assumes it was an act of vengeance for a little lesson he taught a couple of robbers, and does some murdering of his own. Vengeance leaves Casey with anger management problems and no proper direction to his life, so he takes the invitation of his senpai Nakabara (Kane Kosugi, not as horrible as usual) to visit his dojo in Thailand to get a grip on himself again.

However, it soon turns out that Namiko’s murder had rather more complicated reasons, and that Goro (Shun Sugata), the son of a former enemy of her father, is the man truly responsible, and still rather vengeful too. Casey decides perhaps a little more vengeance will make him feel better about himself, so he travels to Myanmar, where Goro has built quite a career as a jungle-based drug lord, to finish matters between them.

With Shadow of a Tear, director Isaac Florentine and actor/martial artist Scott Adkins continue their mission to make martial arts and action movies in a more classical style, which turn out to be as good as anything you will find in the genre. Unlike the first Ninja, this isn’t quite as much a love letter to even the cheesiest and silliest of Western made ninja films (though it shares the first film’s basic respect for Japanese culture as well as the highly excellent concept of casting actors from the correct parts of Asia to play the role of characters from said regions), but more interested in being a classic martial arts revenge movie. Which only is a bad thing to the degree the film can’t do anything better than kill Mika Hijii’s character – the only woman with an actual role in the film – off early on to motivate its male protagonist. Not exactly a plot device I love, though it would on the other hand have been quite difficult to find any other reason to get Casey back into the killing habit.

At least, and this is something Florentine always does well beside his obvious virtues as an action director, the handful of scenes between Adkins and Hijii do sell them very well as a loving couple, and Hijii as a person, which is a good way to keep Adkins sympathetic once he gets down to violent business. Florentine is one of the handful of directors in contemporary action cinema who actually seems to understand that the moments when people aren’t fighting are important too, and who is able to use these moments to build a modicum of emotional momentum. A modicum of emotional momentum of course being all a film needs that expresses most of its emotional content through violent action.

By now, it seems hardly necessary to talk about Florentine’s – damn correct – idea of how to film a martial arts fight in a way that shows off the performers and keeps an audience excited as well as oriented about what is going on, nor to praise his ability to go back to this older, non-shaky, style of action filmmaking without eschewing what modern technology can provide, namely giving the camera a physical presence during the fights which makes them all the more dynamic. Unlike some other Florentine admirers I’m not using the word “realistic” to describe the fight scenes, because of course, these fights are as beautifully (and brutally) choreographed as only screen fights can be. Realism, on the other hand, would be rather less attractive (and would probably not contain performers on the level of Adkins or Tim Man), and would look nothing at all like the glorious one-take fight in a dojo relatively early on in the movie, or like the explody ninja action in the film’s pre-finale.

All of Ninja: Shadow of a Tear’s beautiful carnage is presented with great flair for good location work (most of the film being shot in Thailand), actually intelligent use of colour filters (which is to say, a use that knows where and when not to use them too), and the enthusiasm of true believers in the martial arts film as an art form that can and does express a lot of things through its violence. I, for one, am certainly much too distracted by excitement to disagree with this enthusiasm.

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Muscle Heat (2002)

Japan in the far-flung future of 2009. Apparently, the country has been in a horrible recession for twenty years, and Tokyo's suburbs have become lawless zones where poverty and gang lords rule. A comparatively new drug named Blood Heat makes matters even worse.

The gang of international evildoers selling and producing Blood Heat also make a bit of extra money by organizing cage matches to the death. After all, what's good for Tina Turner must be good for Masaya Kato too. In fact, the whole drug business is going so well for Kato's Rai Kenjin that he's planning on ruling the world some day. These plans also include blackmailing a scientist into science-ing up a new, improved version of the drug that turns the people who take it into insane fighting machines, but since the new version already exists when Rai is working on convincing the scientist, I really don't have a clue what that's all about. Neither does the script.

Anyhow, someone does seem to want to hinder Rai from becoming king of the world and hires former navy seal Joe Jinno (Kane Kosugi), who has suffered some sort of trauma from not shooting children, and former airborne ranger turned cop Aguri Katsuragi (Sho Aikawa!) to (probably) kill Lai. I think. Things don't go too well for our heroes (turns out just running into the bad guy's lair shooting and screaming is not a very good plan), and Katsuragi soon enough finds himself in one of those cage matches to the death against one of Rai's drug-enhanced humans. Hello, Sho Aikawa-style death scene.

Joe, who somehow escaped the gangsters will obviously take revenge for his dead partner, but before he can do that, he'll have to rescue an annoying little kid, befriend Katsuragi's cop little sister (Misato Tachibana), and kick a lot of people in the face. There's also some stuff about corruption and people living underground rising up against their drug lord oppressors, but really, who knows what that's supposed to be about?

In 2002, the dumb 90s action movie was alive and well and living in Japan, and featuring Sho Kosugi's horrible son Kane. Why hire someone who can use more facial expressions than a vacant stare, a vacant glare and a vacantly puzzled look, after all? To be fair, while Kosugi couldn't act his way out of a paperbag, and has the charisma of that paperbag, he is pretty good when doing action sequences. In a lot of action films, that would be more than enough, but Muscle Heat is indulging in the fine art of self-sabotage in two ways: firstly by wasting Kosugi's actual talent on action scenes that aren't really bad, but are bland and choreographed without much imagination. Although the action choreographer comes from China, the film's style seems more oriented on the worst aspects of US-centric martial arts movies of the 80s and 90s (you know, the sort of thing you just might have found Sho Kosugi in). If the best you can do for your final fight is a cage match (the most boring set-up in all of martial arts cinema), you're not really trying.

Muscle Heat's second problem is a bit more likeable - after all, it seems to be born from ambition and not the lack of it. For some reason, Tetsuya Oishi (who wrote the scripts for some good films, too) tries to shoehorn an incredible amount of plot threads into the film. There's the whole economical collapse story, the minor revolution, Kosugi's weird backstory, the attempt to make the film feel "international" by having the characters speak in Cantonese, English and Japanese (which of course backfires by having the actors frequently talk in languages they aren't speaking well at all), the whole drug angle - it's just an incredible amount of stuff that might have amounted to something interesting in a film that put as much effort in developing these threads, or even (fat chance!) turning them into a narrative that makes any sort of sense. Instead, Muscle Heat just heaps stuff upon more stuff without much rhyme or reason, until it nearly collapses under the weight of accumulated nothing.

This is not to say that Ten Shimoyama's (who can do better, too) film is completely without merit: there is - after all - Sho Aikawa chewing scenery for twenty minutes and doing not just one but two of his patented scenes of EXTREME DYING, a lot of the signifiers of cool used so badly they become utterly ridiculous (basically, everything Masaya Kato's character does, especially when it's happening in slow motion, which it frequently does), action movie physics (who knew you can throw a knife so hard your victim will be catapulted back and upwards by it?) and more throw back scenes into everything that already didn't work in action movies during the 90s than one could wish for - all presented with bad camera angles and editing that does not believe in things like cause and effect. Actually, I suspect without Kosugi's black hole-like charisma, I might have enjoyed Muscle Heat a lot more and would now be singing its praises as a ridiculously silly and entertaining piece of retro action cinema.

 

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