Ninja vs. Shark (2023)

directed by Koichi Sakamoto

Japan

77 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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Good if you want to see Haruki from Ultraman Z solo not just one but two evil sharks, the second of which explodes when killed.

I recently watched and reviewed Shogun's Ninja, and my opinion was that it was alright but the ending kind of pissed me off. Much like that film, Ninja vs. Shark has a cast largely made up of actors from tokusatsu series, in addition to having been written by Ultra series veteran Junichiro Ashiki. We've got Kohshu Hirano (Ultraman Z), Kanon Miyahara (the coolest person in this movie, Kamen Rider Gotchard), Yuichi Nakamura (Kamen Rider Hibiki), Hideyoshi Iwata (the guy who doesn't talk in Ultraman Geed as well as many in-suit Ultra roles), Takaya Aoyagi (Ultraman Orb, Ultraman Z) in a surprisingly small role, and more. There is a little less fight choreography in this than in the other film, which didn't bother me, but the film as a whole also feels less cohesive than Shogun's Ninja and is severely lacking in the "likeable characters" department, save for Miyahara's freaky kunoichi.

That leads me to the first point I'd like to address, this movie's elephant (shark?) in the room: Hirano's character Kotaro, towards the beginning of the film, rapes a woman and murders her husband as well as several bystanders, and this is not addressed at any point for the rest of the movie except - and this might actually be worse than if it had fully been left alone - when the murdered woman comes back as a reanimated corpse, carrying her husband's severed head and fighting against Kotaro via kunoichi enchantment. Three-quarters of the way through, in disbelief, I re-wound the movie back to the part where all that happened, just to make sure I wasn't misreading something. The protagonist - who has a character arc, a tragic backstory, and is ultimately set up to become the hero of the film - is a rapist and murderer and this is NEVER addressed? Not a single moment of "oh I've done some bad things in my past that I now regret"? No excuse, such as him being possessed by shark magic at the time? He just... commits rape and murder and then decides to fight as a good guy and no one ever mentions it? I'm probably going to rewind the movie a second time, because I just cannot believe it would do that. It soured the entire film for me and I think I otherwise would have enjoyed it.

So, moving past that as much as we can, let's talk about the plot, which is less bonkers than you might imagine for this kind of thing. A small village in Edo begins to have a significant sharkmurder issue thanks to a local cult leader using ninjitsu to possess sharks and have them kill pearl divers in order for the cult to obtain their pearls, which also have magic powers. The cult leader himself can turn into a kind of half-shark, half-human hybrid when necessary, and has also been stealing young, handsome men to bodysnatch them and maintain his eternal youth, spirit-hopping from body to body when his current one gets too old. That is all really pretty cool. Conceptually, this movie is pretty cool. Practically, it kind of does feel like a time-travel tokusatsu episode stretched out to 77 minutes and with more characters added into the mix. Is that a bad thing? Not inherently, but I already had some animus towards this movie due to its bizarre choices, so I didn't vibe with it.

The acting in this one is surprisingly decent, with Hirano putting in a particularly intense performance of a terrible character. I mostly know him as Haruki, who was a bit of a goofball; there's absolutely none of that here, he plays Kotaro totally straight. Speaking of intensity, Miyahara as Kikuma is also fully absorbed in her role, and with a lack of other interesting characters, she was the only person in the film I really cared about. The movie doesn't have Sakamoto's signature explicit horniness per se, but unfortunately there's still a really bad vibe running throughout it where despite the film only being 77 minutes it contains an uncomfortable amount of sexual assault that often comes out of nowhere. The cult leader is implied to maybe be attracted to men but that element is only tossed in to make the viewer uncomfortable.

And the sharks. A thought occurred to me while I was watching this, which was that if the whole idea of sharksploitation didn't exist, Ninja vs. Shark would honestly just kinda be a movie. The film is obviously conscious of the sharksploitation subgenre, but the way it incorporates sharks into the plot feels... diegetic, if we can apply that term here? Replace sharks with literally any other animal and it would still work. If the cult leader had the ability to enchant tigers and transform into them, this could be Ninja vs. Tiger. The CGI on the sharks looks dreadful, of course, but a sharksploitation movie wouldn't feel right without bad CGI.

I don't really know what to make of this. There's a good movie in there somewhere. Well, not "good", but fun. I just wish it had made better choices along the way. A combination of Ninja vs. Shark and Shogun's Ninja would be incredible, if it existed: women ninjas fighting evil sharks with a gay couple somewhere in the mix? Sakamoto, if you're listening, the people do seem to love a shared cinematic universe.