Ninja Kamui

Episode 2

If the first episode was the big action showcase meant to hype us up for what the rest of the show has to offer, this one is more of a cooldown. Well, as much as a show like this can slow down, considering the episode opens with a guy getting brutally tortured and ends with a fight between our protagonist and a ninja disguising himself as an Uber Eats delivery guy, but otherwise, it's pretty light on intensity. Instead, it dials things back in favor of a little more story set-up and starts to answer some of the mysteries in the premiere.

For one thing, it turns out that the name "Joe Logan" was indeed a very silly alias, and our vengeful protagonist is a ninja named Higan. We also learn that ninjas used to work behind the scenes to maintain peace in Japan but have since expanded the scope of their operations to the rest of the world, which includes divulging their secrets to outsiders and are willing to kill anyone within their ranks not willing to get with the program. Since there have been news headlines of serial murders being carried out by them, it seems pretty safe to say that Higan was likely among those not willing to go along with their policy changes. However, the exact details of why assassins hunted him and his family still aren't totally clear.

Beyond that bit of speculation, though, the rest of the episode's content was pretty light. After successfully capturing one of his pursuers and making him into a pincushion (which was presumably meant to look cool, but I'm not big on torture scenes personally), Higan decides to get in contact with two FBI agents named Mike and Emma, who have been looking into the case of his family's murder, in order exchange information. After Mike agrees to meet with Higan and briefly attempts to arrest him, the two are interrupted by the aforementioned Uber Eats ninja, which is by far the biggest highlight of the episode. In addition to the same kind of over-the-top physical combat we saw in the first episode, we also get to see the two of them whip out some good old-fashioned ninjutsu, and it makes for a pretty fun bit of spectacle.

While the bulk of this episode didn't do as much for me as the first one, it still had a few good bits here and there. For one thing, I got a pretty good kick out of Higan and Mike's attempts to set up a meeting where Higan breaks the burner phone he's calling on after Mike gives him a hard time and then immediately calls back on a second burner phone, which leaves Mike pleading for him not to hang up again. I also enjoyed how Mike's dramatic attempts to arrest Higan during their meetup kept getting interrupted by random delivery guys before the last one turned out to be a ninja. These scenes weren't laugh-out-loud funny, but they at least give me hope that Sunghoo Park and his team have enough self-awareness to throw in a little bit of levity in between all the revenge movie cliches, and that should probably be enough to keep this show from taking itself too seriously, which is currently my biggest fear. For now, though, I'm still having fun, and for something as straightforward as this, that's about all I can ask for

Rating:

Random Thoughts

• While the scene itself was a little random, I did enjoy the bit in the episode where Higan beats up a pair of small-town cops in an extremely cartoony fashion after they make the foolish mistake of trying to harass him while he's at a bar.

• The episode ends with the revelation that the ninjas are being backed by a megacorp named Auza, which seems to be functionally not-Amazon as we see them doing things like food deliveries and making drones. While I can't say I'd expect this kind of show to offer any serious critiques on corporate capitalism, it would give it something else to work with besides all the revenge movie stuff, so hopefully, that goes somewhere

• I adore that this show features an opening song by coldrain, who blessed us with the fantastic opening to Rainbow, and the meme-worthy opening to King's Game The Animation, with this one sliding into the latter category with the song being titled "Vengeance" which is about as on the nose as this show could get.

Ninja Kamui airs on Adult Swim and streams on Max.