Is Ninja Assassin the Wachowskis most balanced film yet?
If there’s a single theme that runs through all of the movies that the Wachowski brothers are involved with, it’s a constant inability to stage action scenes and drive a plot forward at the same time. Even as a fan of the first two Matrix films and, yes, Speed Racer, it’s impossible for me to ignore the fact that for some reason they just can’t synthesize storytelling with set pieces. Thankfully, they seem to be improving at the very least in managing the appropriate proportions between excitement and exposition. The Matrix Revolutions was one long and boring conversation about what everything means, occasionally broken up by dudes punching each other, but there was much more racing than recapping in Speed Racer, and in Ninja Assassin, their latest producing effort, there are thankfully only one or two sequences where characters stop to set the scene. Unfortunately, those sequences are still as clunky and ham-fisted as their predecessors, but on the whole, Ninja Assassin is a tight-lip
