You don’t need me to tell you that ninjas are cool. You don’t need me to tell you that movies about ninjas are cool, even when they aren’t so good. Because they’re full of ninjas. There’s even an ancient proverb: “Ninjas cover a multitude of sins.”

This movie is not so good. The plot is rickety, and the performances of the non-ninja characters are uniformly junior-varsity. There are even times when you think they’re trying to save money by shooting some of the action sequences in lighting so dim it’s hard to tell who’s doing what awesome thing to whom.

The IMdB trivia for this movie says that the script was scrapped 6 weeks before filming and handed to some hack who completed a full rewrite in 53 hours. When they leak a datapoint that specific, you can be sure they’re proud of it. They shouldn’t be. The script makes no sense, and if there weren’t hordes of ninjas emerging from the shadows to stomp ass all the time I would have really been upset about the low regard in which the filmmakers hold my intellect.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter. Because the movie is full of ninjas. Not just any ninjas, either. The King of movie ninjas, Sho Kosugi is in this movie. When the ninja movie craze in the West died in the late eighties, Sho moved away and made ninja movies for more appreciative audiences – but he’s back in “Ninja Assassin” and he’s even scarier than I remembered. He gets a lot of scenery to chew in his role as the evil clan leader, and he makes the most of it.

The movie’s star, Rain, is a Korean pop singer. I don’t know exactly how he got the part, but he keeps his mouth shut and focuses on looking angry and doesn’t detract in any major way. He does just fine with the choreography – I imagine you’ll be seeing quite a bit more of him in this kind of role.

If you like ninjas, even a little bit, you should see this on the big screen. It’s got all the fake blood, ridiculous weaponry, and bad-ass slow-mo death you could want. As a bonus, it has a climactic fight scene with effing Sho Kosugi.

If you don’t like ninjas, I do not understand you.