Ninja Assasin

Directed by James McTeigue. Starring Rain, Naomie Harris, Ben Miles, Sho Kosugi, Rick Yune 18 cert, gen release, 99 min

WHAT'S IT about, you ask? Har, har! Following up his passable V for Vendetta(inspiration for a surprisingly vigorous cult), James McTeigue has embarked on an agreeably uncomplicated genre piece.

The economically named Rain, an occasional Korean pop star, stars as a superhumanly gifted ninja who just can’t stop being angry at the clan that seized him as a child and caused the death of his first love. In contemporary Berlin, he meets up with Naomie Harris, an apparent representative of Team Europe: World Police, and they set out to inconvenience this Ozunu clan, which now provides assassins for various ghastly hoodlums.

There's other stuff as well. But the plot is really little more than a device to facilitate the frequent breaking of noses and repeated severing of extremities. The two leads are charming enough and much of the martial arts work is impressive. Combining the plausibly physical and the revoltingly fantastic (that rare 18 cert indicates quite how much blood is spilt), Ninja Assassinalmost manages to straddle the line between cheap pulp and mid-budget, multiplex thriller.

Almost. The picture is not quite brutal enough to excuse its lunatic plotting, and it ends up seeming like a strange hybrid of the utterly mindless and the workably sentient. Still, if decapitations are your thing, you could do worse.