Ninja Assassin

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It's easy to see what V for Vendetta director James McTeigue was trying to do here. He wanted to translate the hyper-violence of amine to celluloid, with lots of blades swishing, hastily decapitated randomers and a general blood-soaked slickness. Well, he does that; Ninja Assassin really does have a lot of polished, incredibly violent action scenes - a couple of them are actually rather nifty. But every other aspect of this film fails, not just miserably, but spectacularly. Horribly dubbed in parts with a plot that is muddled, unoriginal and merely set up as a sorry excuse for the next action scene; you have to wonder if The Wachowski Siblings have now used up all the good will they accumulated with the first Matrix film.

Raizo is a Ninja gone rogue. Sick of the heartless killings his former classmates have carried out under the stern, abusive hand of his old master, he legs it, and instead concentrates on righting the wrongs his former gang of cohorts have involved themselves in. With a wily Interpol agent investigating the series of gruesome murders that the Ninja's have been a part of, her and Raizo's paths are destined to cross. Which they do. Naturally.

When you look at a production as obviously silly as Taken, you can still enjoy it; well, you buy Liam Neeson as a hard bastard and you get the impression the filmmakers know what they're selling is inherently cheesy. Ninja Assassin just thinks it's so cool, and takes itself so seriously, that laughing continually throughout just can't be helped. McTeigue really does make every frame look genuinely beautiful, but he completely forgot about injecting the rest of his film with even a fraction of that vigour.

Unfathomably flat in all areas except the action, Ninja Assassin is basically Asian superstar Rain doing some hardcore yoga in-between slaying henchmen and brooding.