After seeing this movie, I felt divided between two worlds: the world of Scott Adkins' admirers and the world of jaded viewers. Scott Adkins is indeed stunning as a fighter and he can be more than merely satisfying as an actor, but simply seeing this movie's premise already sabotages half of the interest or respect that it should gain. "Shadow of a Tear"...? A movie about an American (oh, great) ninja gone fluffy who is ready to avenge his deceased pregnant wife and becomes the leading badass again? Ninjas are trained in "schools" and any person would see their faces before getting her rear slammed on the tatami? From what I knew, ninjas weren't secretive, they were the incarnation of the notion of "secret", and from a fighting perspective, they weren't keen on taking on N guys and engaging in big fights, they were super goal-oriented and didn't enjoy martial arts fireworks - they were much more akin to a very discrete religious sect than a martial arts school. This conception is more adequate for cartoons than for a movie, especially one that pretends to be rather serious or at least gloomy, but is more likely to elicit laffs and probably a long chain of goofy jokes about Asians, barbed wire, the Indian accent and so on. There should be a stark difference between Undisputed's Yuri and this production's Casey, yet this movie fails to do the difference (arguably minus the array of weapons used by the characters). The plot itself, as a structure, is pretty obvious and devoid of surprises - almost from the beginning of the movie, you can count on at least one of your co-spectators to nudge and whisper, "betcha that X is the guy who did that, though he's faking it?", and most probably, he or she will be right. Great fighting, of course, and Casey's final opponent delivers quite an impressive performance which gets a righteous treatment from the professional camera work, but honestly, it's not the kind of movie that I would want to see more than one time. Not even when sitting around with the chums. I'd pop Undisputed 3 or even 2 (for the n-th time) instead of this.
Review of Ninja: Shadow of a Tear
