Shinobi - Heart Under Blade (2005)

Lovers Fight, but the Love Never Dies

The Good Things
*Excellent action, special effects, and fight scenes. Very fantastic and imaginative.
*Excellent photography and cinematography. Good production design (customes, make-up, props).
*Good story. Has some drama and a big love story, but is not overly melodramatic. If you've seen "Basilisk," this is basically the same plot.
*A great cast of imaginative and well-acted characters (was also pleseantly surprised to see the "Ninja Scroll"'s Kangero in there!).

The Bad Things
*Ummm....

Definately one of my top favorite ninja/samurai movies of all time! I was expecting a long drawn-out melodrama, but was pleseantly surprised with the film's action scenes and photography. Highly reccomended to anybody looking for a good Asian fantasy epic.

DVD and Blu-ray have great picture and sound quality, and include English dubbing and subtitles. Both versions include a number of featurettes. If you see an all-region disc (region 9, I think), it may have good quality, but will only have English subtitles and no special features. July 15, 2008

Decent Martial Arts movie

In all this movie was worth watching once or twice. I'm not that big of a Kung-Fu type movies, but I don't mind watching some senseless violence every once in a while. The computer animation was mediocre to good depending on the brightness of the background at any given time ( on bright you could really notice how fake it looked). The story line as a whole was a little iffy, but I suppose it's tough to make a believable ninjas with superpowers movie. The fight scenes were well choreographed, and I do like how they weren't afraid to kill off some characters unlike many American films. July 5, 2008

Lurking emo, missing action

I got this because it was one of the cheaper blu-rays that I hadn't seen and might care to see. Not a great choice as it turns out. Shinobi is pretty dull.

Camera : many quasi-still shots showing the characters' faces to best effect. Forlorn and wistful being their usual facial expression. Their destiny (big capital letters implied) is calling, cue ponderous music. The male lead looks especially haunted (but with an amazingly trendy Japanese haircut). The female lead is pretty and... haunted. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, the haunted look concludes Shinobi's character development section. Visuals similar to House of Flying Daggers, but not as beautiful or subtle.

Plot? Meh. Others have already reviewed it and there is little more to be told. It doesn't help that the viewers are let in on the Shogun's big secret desire to wipe out the Shinobis at the beginning. OK, martial arts movies aren't necessarily the place to look for great plots. But Shinobi is lamer than many, despite (because of?) its melodramatic Romeo & Juliet pretensions.

Action? Well, the director is not Ang Lee, that's for sure (and yes, I know Ang Lee didn't do martial arts before you know what). There are some good special effects, but again little in the way of camera dynamics. The fights manage to be stylish and boring. No Ong Bak, Shaolin, Jackie Chan or Jet Li here. Not Fight Club either. Those other films get their actors sweaty with in-your-face action, but almost everything here is resolved by various super-powers of dubious interest and cheap CGI wizardry. Nobody breaks a sweat or musses up their hair.

So, if you have an action movie with uninteresting action, nice-ish pix, and a warmed over plot, what's left? A nice showcase for blu-ray technology at cut prices.

Many positive reviewers seem to be anime fans. I am not. I like animation movies in general, but dislike most Japanese anime besides Miyazaki and a few others. Which means my review is probably irrelevant to you if you love anime. June 25, 2008

Shinobi - Heart Under Blade

Smooth, dynamic and visually stunning scenery and special effects. Story line is a bit predictable but if you look for first class action and the mood for a samurai film, this is what u r looking for. Encoding for video and audio are first class rate. A reference for Blu-Ray high definition video. Film transfer is astonishingly better than many U.S.films esp.on dark scenes. June 24, 2008

Live action Anime Ninja romance mash up

Take the story of Romeo and Juliet, mix in elements of The X-Men and Ninja fantasy and you get 'Shinobi - Heart Under Blade'. Two ninja clans, the Koga and the Iga are long time enemies who have formed a truce. The heirs to the leadership of both clans fall in love, but since this movie is similar to Romeo and Juliet you can guess that a tragic fate awaits them. The shogun, who sees both clans as a threat devises a plot to get rid of them by pitting both clans against each other. What follows is a rather enchanting story that is marred by the occasional shoddy CGI effects and some truly questionable acting.

Don't get me wrong, 'Shinobi' is a great film with some truly awesome cinematography and some great action scenes; it truly feels like a live action Anime. Sadly though, dialogue delivery feels rather forced at times, and rarely authentic and some of the charaters in the film exhibit rather cheesy qualities. Couple that with the most predictable of story lines and you get a decent film that could have been something amazing. The majority of the characters seem almost like cardboard cut outs; the script makes no motions to flesh out their back stories or motivations. Though the intentions of both clans are never really explored, the clans are polarized with one seemingly 'good' and the other seemingly 'evil', though it is never really told why this is. I could totally be missing the mark, but these were my observations.

It may sound like I didn't enjoy the film, but as you can see by the star rating I gave I did enjoy it a lot. Despite all its flaws 'Shinobi' is an entertaining film with some stunning visuals. One of the things that hurts this film the most is that it tries to be both a romance and an action film, and sadly the romance portion gets somewhat lost in the fray. The romance between the two clan heirs is never fully developed and hardly gets any screen time. The battle scenes are pretty clever and entertaining. All of the characters have some form of special power, and there are duels aplenty to enjoy.

This Blu Ray features a pretty gorgeous picture, albeit some spikes in grain and the occasional soft, two-dimensional looking frame. 'Shinobi' doesn't have that 'pop' that is found in the best of HD titles, but it won't disappoint and is certainly a step up from the Standard DVD version. Colors can be vivid (especially in the forest scenes), however it is very inconsistent. Black levels are pretty bad as well, with crush overcoming most of the night scenes along with a drop in contrast. The special effects suffer greatly under the HD spotlight; there were numerous effects that looked too fake (I'm guessing this is due to the enhanced clarity of the picture).

The audio quality is pretty impressive, offering up the most minute of audio details in stunning clarity. The battle scenes especially benefit from this; 'Shinobi' takes on a very Anime-like soundtrack that truly compliments the film.

This Blu Ray edition ports over all of the standard DVD special features, making of featurettes etc. I was somewhat disappointed that FUNimation didn't transfer the features into HD, but this seems to be a common trend for Blu Ray titles.

Overall I was pretty impressed with this film, despite the few arguments I presented earlier. While 'Shinobi' isn't the best of Asian dramas, its certainly a great ninja flick with many Anime like qualities.

Movie Quality - 4/5
Picture Quality - 3.5/5
Audio Quality - 4/5
Special Features - 3/5 June 21, 2008

More reviews at Amazon.com ...