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Review:
Ninjas. Ninjas are cool; ninjas are deadly. They are masters of the hidden arts and dress in tight, black leather. They work in the shadows. They conk their heads on low hanging beams…
It’s somehow impossible to imagine that director Hiroyuki Nakano didn’t have his tongue planted at least a little in cheek during his Toei Studio 2001 film Red Shadow. In fact, it’s almost as if he couldn’t resist having just a little fun, and that light-heartedness might have been this film’s major saving grace. Without the glossy, big budget impact of something like Shinobi, without the serious angst of something like Princess Blade, and lacking any real power in the scripting department, despite some definite potential, this film could have been mostly unremarkable. But Nakano’s quirkiness as well as his visual flare for composition and colour makes Red Shadow watchable, indeed enjoyable if you're not looking for anything too taxing.
Masanobu Ando (Big Bang Love: Juvenile A) is Red Shadow, a.k.a Akakage. Along with his friends Aokage (Blue Shadow and it's sort of starting to sound like the Power Rangers to me by this point) and pretty ninja-ette Asuka, they do what ninjas do without question and with only a little goofing around. It's a job, and they're young and it's a bit hard to be completely serious when sure-fire ninja moves involve kneeing the guards in the jewels and the rafters are crowded with other assassins trying to jump the cue.
And if that sounds a bit like comedy, it's only because it's actually a tiny bit irreverent. As with Nakano's other works, like Stereo Future, it's the odd, off-beat elements in Red Shadow that give an otherwise straightforward story a sense of charm and make it worth watching. The story itself is fairly basic – duty versus desire, betrayal, power jockeying and the ninjas in the middle just trying to survive – but where most films would have thrown themselves happily into formulaic love triangles to try and cover up lack of proper plot, Red Shadow merely acknowledges that expectation and then moves on. It doesn't try to be anything more than it is, and that it isn't desperately trying to convince you it's a great film is more than a little refreshing.
Perhaps it's wrong of me to judge a film not on how good it is but on how much worse it could have been, but in a world of easy answers I tend to appreciate it more when the guy doesn't get the girl just because that's what everyone else would have done. In this case, such a superficial conclusion would have weakened the strength of the female characters, and considering that this is basically the Japanese equivalent of a b-grade, the fact that I can even put the words 'strong' and 'female characters' in the same sentence is probably something of a wonder. More than that though, the desire to give in to the temptation of this and other decidedly ordinary narrative elements would have undermined the mild, fresh approach Nakano has to the material. With a funky soundtrack and some decent action scenes, with deft and stylish editing, an unwillingness to linger on anything that would highlight its flaws and with some unexpected little references (like a cool and completely pointless cameo by Tomoyasu Hotei, the serious swordsman from Samurai Fiction), the director balances easily on an edge that, while by no means inspired here, at least does never slips into true mediocrity.
6 Other Ninja Factions Hiding in the Crawlspace out of 10 by Deni Stoner back to the top
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