Ninja Assassin

With a title that so brazenly lunges for the hokum jugular, this should have been a claret-soaked cakewalk for Wachowski cohort James McTeigue. Instead, we’re lumbered with a garish and poorly filmed chop-socky frolic that makes about as much sense as an Escher painting viewed through Vaseline-smudged Ray-Bans. The ‘ninja’ of the title is coiffed, toned and oiled lone gun Raizo (unconvincing South Korean pop sensation Rain, below) who becomes a target for government spies. Aside from the flashbacks detailing his years of training in a mountain commune, the film takes place in disused warehouses and offices in – for some reason – Berlin. The supporting cast – including Naomie Harris with a creaky Yank drawl – are little more than expositionary cyphers, and by the time you get to an army of tooled-up foot soldiers being shredded to mincemeat in a hail of death stars, you’ll be too numbed with boredom to care.