Any person volunteering to sit through a movie called Ninja Assassin is there to see one thing. Lucky for them, V for Vendetta adapter James McTeigue’s Wachowski-endorsed return to directing provides plenty of buzzing shurikens and mindless melee.

Raizo (played by South Korean pop sensation Rain) spent the good part of his youth training to be one of the world’s deadliest killers. But when his clan slays the woman he sorta-kinda loves, blood-soaked betrayal ensues and the streets of Berlin become riddled with filleted foot soldiers and rivers of glow-in-the-dark red stuff. Fighting alongside Raizo is a sassy Europol agent (Naomie Harris) and an army of German troops who are eliminated in a myriad of unconventional ways.

Ninja Assassin’s B-movie blend of digital and live-action stunts should impress fans of insanely over-the-top videogame gore. (Yet they may tire of not having the option to just pick up a joystick and control the carnage at will.) Visual gimmickry aside, the big blunder is the utterly daft dialogue that occasionally surfaces to make us cringe between assaults of two-dimensional combat. Not even a ninja assassin could escape such schlocky depths.

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