Editor's Note: CinemaSpy first reviewed Ninja Assassin back on Oct. 14 at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF). What follows below is our original [unaltered] review.

Ninjas used to be scarier. In the B-movies of the 1970s, the ninja was a mysterious and occult figure, cold and soulless, that was to be overcome by the likes of Chuck Norris.

But in the past thirty years, the ninja has become commodified. Chris Farley's Beverly Hills Ninja and the Ask a Ninja Web site are clever, but they are evidence that the ninja has become a joke.

Producers Andy and Larry Wachowski and director James McTeigue are trying to reappropriate the ninja character in Ninja Assassin. Starring Rain — who appeared in Speed Racer, also from the Wachowskis —  the film is both an attempt to put the fearsomeness back into the ninja, as well as an homage to those B-movies that made the ninja so iconic to western audiences.

And it almost works.

In Ninja Assassin the ninja is something to be feared. They are ghost-like, literally disappearing into shadows thanks to modern computer graphics technology. In the opening sequence of the film the stage is set, as a lone ninja take out a den of Asian gangsters, each armed with an automatic weapon.

Here, ninja attacks are rendered with exquisite detail. The top halves of heads slide slowly off, limbs drop from torsos, bodies sliced in half tumble to the ground. And all the while, the blood flows in torrents.

This blood is bright, candy apple red, not the deep claret you'd see in other projects striving for realism. In some fight sequences that take place in low light, where the figures are almost silhouettes, the fountains of bright red blood are reminiscent of manga and comic books.

This is essentially an origin story. Raizo, played by Rain, is a ninja. He's the kind of ninja from those seminal '70s flicks who can use mind to control body, to stop the flow of blood from cuts, to heal. He's the kind of guy who does vertical pushups on a bed of nails.

In a rather long sequence of intercut scenes, we alternate between young Raizo learning the ways of the Ozunu ninja clan, and older Raizo who is living in Berlin and doing training of his own.

Meanwhile, Europol forensic researcher Mika Coretti (played by Naomie Harris) is on the hunt for evidence proving the existence of the 9 Clans of Ninja that have for a thousand years supposedly been available for assassination contracts for the price of 100 pounds of gold.

She convinces her superior, played by Ben Miles, to pursue an investigation. It's a dangerous case that brings the ninjas out to put a stop to it. Which is what Raizo, bent on revenge against his clan, was waiting for. That leads to a third act that is nothing more than one glorious fight sequence after another. And lots of blood.

But for all the whirlwind action, Ninja Assassin suffers from a weak script (from Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski, who is rumored to have rewritten Sand's draft in 53 hours; he should have taken more time). We spend too much time having the characters explain the mythology of the world to us, and weak attempts at one-line humor make Rain and Harris out to be terrible actors.

There are some weak attempts to create tension around a few double-cross moments, but these are never very convincing.

Director McTeigue is also a bit heavy handed. The choreography of some of the fight sequences is made incomprehensible by a camera that moves too much, and his use of a downpour to enhance an emotional moment in Ninja Assassin he stole from his own V for Vendetta.

But the biggest frustration about Ninja Assassin is that the filmmakers try to have it both ways. They reinvent the ninja as a shadowy and unstoppable force, but they ignore that in an attempt to pull off an ending. They break their own story logic just so they can have a tidy "I saved you, you saved me" resolution.

It's too bad, because Ninja Assassin comes close to rescuing the figure from the Saturday morning cartoons. Instead, it's nothing more than a stylish and bloody loop of fight sequences. No adrenaline rush is worth that.