The director of Samurai Fiction, Hiroyuki Nakano, follows up his award winning film with Red Shadow, a ninja action-comedy hybrid that doesn't quite deliver as much as it looks like it will by the time the end credits hit the screen.

Three young ninjas, Red Shadow, Blue Shadow and Asuka (the token hot chick in a fishnet ninja suit – yowza!), finish their ninja training and graduate to the ranks of Akakage Ninjas. Their mentor, White Shadow, awards them some special armor made of a heavenly metal and sends them out to their first mission – to carry out the assassination of a Princess by a gang of enemy ninjas.

As they set out on their tasks, they find that they must not only work together using all of their finely honed ninja skills, but that they must look inside and do some serious self examination along the way, in order to make the right decisions and ultimately do the right thing – regardless of how they have been raised and what they have been taught.

One thing this movie really has going for it is ninja-presence. This isn't one of those movies that promises a ninja on the front cover but only really has one in a scene or two. This movie is chock full of ninjas, and that's a very good thing. Those of us raised in the eighties who fondly remember Sho Kosugi's fine films from that era know that men (and in this case, a foxy lady) clad in black pajamas and running around jumping, flipping, and slashing things always makes for a good time. Ninjas have a great screen presence and sadly, we don't seem to get the kind of nor sheer volume of ninja action these days that we did twenty-odd years ago. So when I found out just how many ninjas were in Red Shadow, I was pretty stoked to be able to check it out on this fine DVD release.

Sadly, quantity of ninjas is really all that this movie has to offer. Sure, it looks slick and there's some nice cinematography, pretty sets bringing us back to period Japan, and some cool costumes but the story spends too much time trying to decide if it wants to be a 'balls out' action movie or a comedic coming of age story to really do a good job of being either in the end. The characters are superficial and not really all that amusing, the fight scenes cut too fast and offer almost zero carnage (not that I necessarily need bloodshed to enjoy a film but in a real ninja movie, some gore is basically a given) and because of that don't have much impact. This is all set to a hard rock soundtrack that feels very out of place against the old school Japanese sets on which the film was shot.

The direction is competent and the movie has a very nice look to it but that isn't enough to save what, after over two hours of running time, turns out to be a rather pedestrian storyline that doesn't truly go anywhere of offer us much of interest. I really wanted to like this movie – I'm one of those guys secretly and silently praying for a ninja revival – but despite my best efforts I found myself waiting, and waiting, and waiting for something cool to happen and it was all to no avail.

Video:

Red Shadow gets a great 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that looks very, very good. Print damage is almost entirely non-existent and save for some really minor mpeg compression that creeps up here and there in some of the darker scenes, the image is clean and highly detailed. Colors are well defined and don't bleed into each other even once, and skin tones look lifelike and natural. Edge enhancement is only visible in a few scenes (and even then you kind of have to be looking for it) and the level of clarity visible in the picture is very high.