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I’ve Seen Fire, And I’ve Seen Rain | Korean pop star Rain makes his Hollywood debut in the cheerfully senseless Ninja Assassin.

NINJA ASSASSIN
Directed by James McTeigue. Starring Rain, Naomie Harris, Sho Kosugi. Now playing.
***

Though it lacks the built-in nerd pedigree of Drag Me to Hell and Inglourious Basterds from earlier this year, Ninja Assassin is a true exercise in old-school genre revivalism from its title right down to the bones of its gleefully daft narrative. And while director James McTeigue lacks the distinctive vision or ambition of a Sam Raimi or a Quentin Tarantino, he handles his gloriously pulpy material (provided here by Matthew Sand and comics superstar J. Michael Straczynski) with affection, panache, and a welcome disdain for reason. But when your movie is called Ninja Assassin, you best leave reason at home — possibly gagged and handcuffed to your radiator.

Ninja Assassin wears its love for movies like Shogun Assassin, Iron Monkey, and Ninja Scroll proudly on its sleeve, though it’s actually McTeigue’s ability to seamlessly blend the conventions of different pulp genres that makes the film most interesting. The movie starts out — structurally, anyway — comfortably in the mould of an old supernatural horror film, with a group of gangsters getting creatively dismembered by something flitting in and out of the shadows, whereupon they spurt entirely too much cherry-red blood in all directions, scream, and then get dismembered even more. Only the creature in the shadows isn’t a monster or a ghost: it’s a ninja.

Shortly after the initial scene of just-winking-enough mayhem we meet Mika (Naomie Harris), a Europol researcher who believes that a network of ancient ninja assassins exists, and her superior officer Maslow (Ben Miles), who is skeptical. The two spout exposition and quips for a while, then Mika is saved from ninja assassination by Raizo (Korean pop superstar and Stephen Colbert archnemesis Rain), a rogue ninja assassin devoted to bringing down the ring of bad ninja assassins that Mika was right about all along.
Yes. Oh yes. Oh God, yes.

While the opening half-hour is never boring, it does feel a little weighed down by a few too many Raizo training sequences, and McTeigue finds and maintains a nice “violence-tension-violence” pace around the time Raizo and Mika team up. It’s at this point that the film hits a more traditional action-revenge stride, though the horror film-inspired love of campy gore and nigh-invincible villains with a tendency to appear behind protagonists as they’re facing the camera are agreeable constants.

Aside from some lovably unsubtle visual motifs, the film’s only depth comes from the (likely unintentional) double meaning of its title: there are ninjas who perform assassinations and ninjas who are eliminated via a process that might be charitably defined as assassination.

By ninjas.

That is the kind of movie this is.