Asian Audient: Ninja 2: Shadow of a Tear

This is my second-to-last viewing of my 2017 Asian Audient series.

I didn't mean for a whole week to go by after watching my November entry in Asian Audient before getting a chance to write about it. Then again, I didn't even mean for this to be my November entry in Asian Audient.

How I landed on Ninja 2: Shadow of a Tear in the first place was by scrolling endlessly on our streaming services last Friday night. I was really looking for something from 2017, to keep building my list. Failing in that effort, I noticed this title from 2013, which I'd remembered Matt Singer discussing on Filmspotting: SVU, talking about how, to his surprise, it was either hilariously awesome or actually awesome. Either was good enough for me. (He also said you did not need to see the original movie, nor that it even had any relation in terms of plot or characters -- though now that I look it up, I see star Scott Adkins was also in 2009's Ninja.)

Even then it would not have been my November entry for Asian Audient, except a) I had nothing else already lined up, and b) it, surprisingly, had some major elements I had been lacking in the series so far.

Although the film stars Adkins, a Brit playing an American, and is in English more than it is in any other language, it does have those other languages. But the real convincing factor was that it spends time in two different Asian countries that I had not visited so far in this series. After starting in Japan, which has already been well covered, the action shifts to two other countries we haven't seen yet: Thailand and Myanmar. In fact, some of the language may even be Thai or Burmese, though I could not tell you that for sure. I gave up a while ago on finding some of the back catalog of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which is notoriously hard to source, so this seemed like a good substitute as I tried to fill the one remaining of my four non-Chinese, non-Japanese films. (The other three were two from Korea and one from Indonesia.) As the film revealed one location and then the other, my decision solidified.

No, director Isaac Florentine has no Asian heritage, but he does have one of the best B movie director names of all time.

Ninja 2 does have a lot of the surface signifiers of a B movie, especially that title, but the difference is that it's actually good. It concerns Adkins' American martial arts expert, Casey Bowman, who teaches in a dojo in Tokyo and has a happy life with his wife, Namiko (Mika Hijii), who is pregnant with their first child. With this kind of setup you know that she and the child won't be around long. Indeed she is killed one night when he is out at the store trying to fulfill some of her pregnancy cravings (chocolate-covered seaweed, just one example of the small details this movie gets right), and a vengeful Bowman initially blames two thugs who earlier mugged him in one of the film's many fight sequences. However, the deeper he digs, the more he realizes he may be the target of an old adversary of his wife's father, who has a drug organization in Myanmar. He goes to Thailand to train and try to move past the trauma, all the while gathering information on where he may find the drug lord's secret hideout in the Myanmar jungle.

The plot of Ninja 2 is surprisingly sturdy. It seems to honor credible strains of lore in the Japanese martial arts community, but more than that it is built on a step-by-step logic that never strains credibility and feels as though it were genuinely thought out. I alluded earlier to small details that the movie gets right, and some of these are in its dialogue. Even though an action movie relying on fight choreography could conceivably leave dialogue (and acting) as its last priority, this film does not. A week later I still remember one particular exchange that I loved. After his wife dies and Bowman is being interviewed by a detective, the detective asks him if anything is missing from the house. "Everything," Bowman says, staring off into the middle distance. Simple, but effective.

And Adkins is really acting here. Yeah, this is a guy hired for his moves -- no stunt man required -- but he doesn't slough off the task of showing genuine emotion in the wake of his wife's death. In fact, he takes a long time to recover from the episode, as you would expect he would, and he seems genuinely able to conjure up tears on subsequent episodes when he's required to think about her. Adkins can't help but seem like the modern incarnation of someone like Chuck Norris, but he brings more to the table in terms of craft -- as well as the same or more in terms of fighting.

The fighting is what I want to really concentrate on. I don't think I've ever seen fight scenes filmed quite as they are in Ninja 2. Most of the hand-to-hand (or foot-to-foot) contact is filmed very close to the action, and apparently, all in one take. Or, where one take is not possible, two longish takes strung together. In other words, there is as close to zero fakery as you can get. These people are really doing these moves in real time, not relying on editing as a crutch. And that doesn't limit the moves into things that are really manageable for the actors. They still seem rather spectacular, and are fully involving.

The film even has room for the villain to have a badass signature weapon, which is kind of like a whip with a barbed wire end. So victims die of a combination of strangulation and the barbs sinking into their neck. Something I hadn't seen before.

Whether Matt Singer meant to recommend this ironically or actually -- and now I'm eager to go back to that episode and find out -- Ninja 2: Shadow of a Tear is a genuinely fun time. It's fun without having to be "fun," as it does not actively play itself up as camp or include anything resembling jokes. However, neither is it anathema to humor, as in the aforementioned sequence in which Adkins plays up being grossed out over the chocolate-covered seaweed his wife asks him to procure.

How will we finish up in December? I can't at this point tell you how, but I can tell you where: China. I've had a couple first choices for the final film and come up empty on them so far, though I have an unlimited number of potential second choices, so with any luck I'll come up with something good to close out the series.