NiNja AssaSSin.

Ninja! The word itself is thrilling. It stirs the playground martial-arts hero in all of us. I’m tempted to say that no film about ninjas has ever been bad. But that would be patently untrue; some of us ninja-istas bemoan to this day the way the reputation of our favourite trained Oriental killers was sullied by the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles. Still, and though my aesthetic tastes generally incline me closer to seven-hour long documentations of the precise pitter-patter of acid rain on post-industrial Ukrainian landscapes, I should admit to having skipped into the screening of James McTeigue’s Ninja Assassin.

Written by Matthew Sand and J Michael Straczynski, it’s a free-ranging, CGI-enhanced and erratically constructed ninja-pudding of a drama. It begins in a Bangkok club, where a bevy of pug-ugly gangsters spit and growl, trash-talk and wave around golden guns.

When the topic of ninjas comes up, their boss laughs; he regards them as medieval fantasies. Such foolishness! Soon the room has been invaded by a slew of shadowy shapes that shift from one surface to another faster than the eye can see and sling pieces of metal that decapitate or bifurcate the tough geezers with supremely ketchupy results.

Two storylines subsequently unfold. One, set in the past, deals with the Ozunu clan, a secret society whose head (Sho Kosugi) abducts children in order to train them as demon-fighters. “You must hate all weakness!” he instructs. Some of the most riveting scenes, as in all martial arts films, show them doing push ups on beds of nails, fighting blindfolded, and being bruised into supreme master of their disciplines. However, one of them – a precociously talented boy called Raizo – runs away after Lord Ozunu allows the murder of his tender-hearted sweetheart.

The second story, mostly set in present-day Berlin, shows the grown-up Raizo (played by Korean pop star Rain) trying to escape the clutches of the clan, as well as intelligence services who seem to think he’s implicated in various political assassinations.

Love interest of a sort comes in the form of Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris), a forensic researcher who believes in him, but who comes across more like his mother than his most intended. Much more riveting is a finale when he comes face-to-face with his Lord Ozunu, a skilled torturer with a fondness for slotting his fist into wounds he himself has inflicted.

It’s easy to laugh at the mixed platter of Asian stock characters. As for the chipmunks-on-heat speed of the editing, McTeigue’s belief that bullet-speed visuals still have the power to startle as much as they did in The Matrix, and an important plotline that involves characters whose hearts are on the wrong side of their chests – absurd, absurd!

But the fight scenes are mostly great. And Rain, so dashing in Speed Racer, is something to behold. His precisely rippled and defined body is awe-inspiring.