121 min | PG-13 | July 23, 2021 | Paramount Pictures
A mute orphan watches his father die, grows up fighting for cash, and gets pulled into a war between two ancient ninja clans. He swears revenge and lies to everyone to get it. Then the movie forgets it ever set that up.
Snake Eyes is a man with no name and one obsession. He sees his father murdered as a boy. He grows into a cage fighter who takes a job from the Yakuza to get close to the killer. The path leads him to the Arashikage, a Japanese ninja clan, where he infiltrates under false pretenses and earns the trust of the heir. Robert Schwentke builds the film around a question of loyalty and earned identity. The film abandons that question whenever it needs a fight scene, which is often.
Henry Golding plays Snake Eyes with the easy charm he brought out of Crazy Rich Asians. He smiles when he should brood and the revenge plot never sits on his face. Andrew Koji plays Tommy, the clan heir who becomes Storm Shadow, and he carries the actual stakes. Koji plays a man watching his birthright slip toward a friend who is lying to him, and the betrayal lands because Koji commits to the wound. Haruka Abe plays Akiko, the clan’s head of security, with a suspicion that the script keeps proving correct. Úrsula Corberó plays the Baroness as a villain dropped in from a different and more fun movie.
Schwentke directs the action with a cutting rate that defeats the choreography. The script by Evan Spiliotopoulos, Joe Shrapnel, and Anna Waterhouse stops the story cold to explain clan mythology about a stone that judges the worthy. The camera sits too close to the fights and the edits chop every exchange into fragments, so a film built on swordsmanship hides its swordsmanship. The Tokyo and Arashikage compound production design does real work, with timber halls and neon streets that feel specific and lived in. The setting deserves a camera that holds still long enough to see it.
This is a film that knows what it wants to be and cannot execute it. The origin of a silent warrior should be a film about restraint and discipline. Instead the editing is frantic and the plot keeps explaining itself. Golding has the presence for a franchise lead and Koji has the conviction for a tragedy, and the movie wastes both on setup for sequels it assumes will come. The bones of a good ninja film are here, buried under exposition and quick cuts.