Following the murder of his pregnant wife, Casey must take his ninjitsu skills and go on the revenge path.
Written by David N. White, Michael Hurst, and Boaz Davidson, and directed by Isaac Florentine, this sequel to Ninja from 2009 takes the lead character and his lady, removes the lady as cause for his revenge need, and sets him loose on his enemy. The man is emotional, he’s grieving, and he’s hellbent on violence. The story has a few twists and turns, but generally speaking it’s an effective revenge film with plenty of martial arts, violence, and kicks to the face. This film was clearly written with Adkins in mind, and it makes the most of his skills while giving him a few more emotional scenes. The way the film is written is not going to lead to tons of surprises, but a few of the twists will come unexpectedly, so it’s come some surprise. Overall, this is a well-written and well-directed sequel made to showcase its star and his skills from start to finish. It’s also very much made to showcase the different locations the story and fights take place in.
The cast here is led by Scott Adkins who is given more to do than the usual kick people in the face and hit them hard. Here he gets a more emotional part as his returning character of Casey is grieving, giving him a new range of emotions to play with and he does quite well. While this is not an Oscar film, his acting is solid. His work here is of course filled with fight scenes and some of his typical fight style, but why fix what is not broken? His work is solid on that front as well. The cast here is composed mainly of people put in his path to either help him or hinder him, so the characters, in most cases, are a bit predictable in how they are and how the cast performs them. Doing great work acting and fighting in his part is Kane Kosugi as Nakabara. He’s great here and shows some range while also showing good fighting skills. Mika Hijii returns as Namiko, Casey’s wife, and gets only a few scenes before she is killed. Those scenes are unfortunately uneven in terms of her acting and some of them are a bit cringeworthy. Of course, some of her scenes coming back over and over as flashbacks do not help in the cringe meter as some of them are just her looking a bit beatific, or at least what seems to be a beatific expression in Casey’s memories.
The film itself looks great with fight choreography by Tim Man who also did stunt coordination with Brahim Chab. The fights are carefully choreographed and clearly designed to fit with Adkins’ strengths. Filming these (and the rest of the film of course), is cinematography by Ross W. Clarkson with editing by Irit Raz. These two must be noted here as the film allows the viewer to see the fights clearly, giving them a viewpoint that works and not constantly editing the fights to hide the presence of stunt doubles for everyone. The film does have a stunt double listed for Adkins (Brahim Chab), but the man is very capable of doing his own fights and it shows. It also allows the editing to require less cuts and the camera to be more stable during these fights, something that is very welcomed. The editing of the flashbacks with flashes of white light is the one downfall of the editing here, but this may have been a stylistic choice from the director as it is present in Undisputed 3: Redemption which Florentine also directed.
Overall, Ninja II is a solid entry in Scott Adkins’ career with good fights and a few emotions allowing him to stretch his acting muscles here and there throughout the film. It’s a solid action film that is something else to see on the big screen (the fest had a brand new DCP, not a screening from Blu Ray or DVD). It’s a lot of fun and one of those films that is easy to rewatch over and over.