You don’t go into a movie entitled Ninja Assassin expecting subtlety and nuance — but if you’re expecting anything more than enthusiastic CGI decapitation and dismemberment from this Wachowski Brothers-produced actioner, then you will probably be disappointed.

What you do get is lots of gory action and lots of ninjas (more than 30 anyway), who stalk the shadows and slice and dice their targets with ninja throwing stars and other sharp weaponry, all of which makes a gunshot wound seem like a pleasant way to go. This is not one for the squeamish: It only takes about three minutes for a Yakuza gangster to get his face lopped off at the mouth, leaving his tongue flapping in the bottom part of his head. And trust me, that’s just for starters. If you like this sort of thing, then you will probably love this movie.

However, the bar for violence of this sort was set pretty high with Tarantino’s Kill Bill, and this new entry lacks the style and the wit of Tarantino’s two-part revenge epic. And for me, the filmmaking approach of Wachowski protégé James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) really undercuts the fun inherent in the simple premise of ninja assassins set loose in a modern world. In my view, the CGI in this movie became a real distraction, totally undermining the remarkable physical efforts of the lead actor and stuntmen. For my money, the athletics and acrobatics should be at the forefront of any martial arts film worth its salt, but here the physicality of the actors was obscured by CGI flying ninja weaponry, 300-inspired slow motion effects, and choppy editing, which all combined to impair the audience’s ability to get a handle on the context of the bloody violence. Indeed, a few of the fight scenes become so spatially incoherent that I started to wonder whether I had perhaps forgotten to pick up my pair of Ninja “see-in-the dark” specs on the way in to the theater.

This approach was perhaps employed to cover up for the fact that the lead actor, a South Korean pop star who goes by the name Rain, had no real martial arts background prior to his training for this movie. I feel bad undermining his efforts, as he’s clearly a quick study and trained tirelessly for this role, but he lacks the charisma and honed skills of the likes of Jackie Chan, Jet Li or Tony Jaa. Yes, those martial artists perform at pretty rarefied heights, but when you’re headlining a ninja movie, those gentlemen are the standard.

The storyline revolves around an underworld crime syndicate, the Ozunu, who take orphans off the street and brutally mold them, in a dojo in the mountains, into the world’s deadliest and most cold-blooded assassins. This thousand-year-old secret society, we are told, still supplies killers to any government that has a “hundred pounds of gold.” If you can allow yourself to buy into that ridiculous premise, then you are probably halfway there to enjoying this movie.

The hero Raizo (Rain) was one of these kids, but “goes rogue” (not in the bus and book-tour way) after his lover is savagely murdered for disobeying Ozuno (ninja film legend Sho Kosugi). Now hiding in Berlin, Raizo still bears the scars of his training, but uses the skills he has learned to protect those that Ozunu has marked for death.

Europol agent Mika Coretti, who seems to speak nothing but exposition, (Naomie Harris — Miami Vice, Pirates of the Caribbean) becomes one of the targets after she uncovers a financial link between several gruesome political murders and this underground network of assassins. Raizo’s lethal mentor, Takeshi (Rick Yune) is dispatched to terminate her investigation, but when she is saved by Raizo, she joins forces with him to try to bring down the Ozunu clan.

The movie’s set-piece de resistance is a battle between a team of ninjas and an Interpol SWAT-esque team, armed with machine guns and shotguns, guarding Raizo in a Safe House in Berlin. But by that stage of the movie, you are under no illusions as to who is going to prevail in that fight. In the battle, Raizo is able to make his escape in a parkour-inspired free-running sequence before a final climatic face-off between Raizo and his two archrivals, Takeshi and Ozunu.

However, by that time I’d become so tired with the leaden, one-note acting and the humorless and cliché script (which was rewritten by scribe Michael Straczynski in 53 hours) that I started to wish for a black ninja one-piece, to help me slink, undetected, out of the movie theater. Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a bloody and action-packed antidote to those pale-faced and goo-goo-eyed celibate vampires this holiday season, then this is probably your best bet.

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