When I woke up this morning I thought to myself ‘well, what do I really want from a movie called Ninja Assassin?’ ‘Well’, I said, or at least this is what my inner monologue said ‘I want a Ninja, and what I want him to do is be raised by a mysterious assassin clan. Then assassinate people.’ Then I went about my day just like normal, then it hit me, I stopped dead in my tracks, which was embarrassing because I was in the supermarket. I had got it all wrong… ‘I want the Ninja to assassinate people’ I thought ‘and I want to see their heads fly off and stuff’. That is what I really wanted from a movie called Ninja Assassin. How could I have been so stupid as to not consider heads flying off and stuff in the first place? I mean, seriously, heads flying off is literally the cornerstone of a movie called Ninja assassin surely? Well anyway, I sat down to watch Ninja Assassin and all my dreams were answered. Heads flying off to the right, limbs to the left, blood squirting all over the place. Add in a storyline which is just complicated enough to make it interesting, but by no means taxes the brain enough to take away from all that fun bloodletting, and you have what I consider to be a pretty great movie. There is some fun stuff going on here with ridiculous clan family speeches, some rubbish about hearts, a couple of envelopes with black powder in (not dissimilar in use to the ‘Black Spot’ from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) and a frankly baffling agency based in Berlin called Europol. It’s like Interpol, but everyone is wearing white suits and keeps engaging in soft core pornography scenes. At least this is probably what it is like; Europol is actually just an excuse to get some non Ninja (read, not Asian. Damn you Europol and your lack of diversity in the workplace) folks involved in the whole thing. The fight scenes are ridiculously confusing. I am sure there are some amazing physical feats going on here, but frankly I was too distracted by all the throwing stars and those knives on the end of chain things flying around, they look awesome. That is not the point though, I don’t think this is for martial arts purists, and you can get much better fixes in far older and far sillier movies. If you are looking for a movie that lives up exactly to its title though, you could do a lot worse than Ninja Assassin.