In its first few minutes, Ninja Assassin has some of the most creative dismemberments that you’re likely to have seen; and then, disappointingly, the satirical blade goes dull. In fact, it takes a considerable amount of time before another weapon is unsheathed, and you start to wonder why the hell we’re in Berlin—or why the hell an American (Naomie Harris) is there working for Europol, where everybody seems to speak English. She is, apparently, the agency’s resident ninjologist, and she uncovers this vast network of martial artists-for-hire who’ve been using their superhuman stamina to knock off despots and drug cartels for centuries. This connects her with the recalcitrant Raizo (played by the Korean actor Rain), a ninja-school dropout who means to avenge his alma mater’s mistreatment of him and, well, everyone else.

Ninjas were a joke well before Kill Bill karate-chopped open the floodgates for them; but this movie’s scriptwriters (Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski) and the director (James McTeigue) don’t appear to be laughing. Ninja Assassin has more squishy heart metaphors than a third-grader’s valentine, and yet the whole brutal affair is gorier than the dumpster behind a slaughterhouse. Who is the target audience? Bleeding-hearts who like to watch hearts bleed? So much of one’s enjoyment is had in quipping at the blockheaded movie’s expense that you almost feel guilty watching this guilty pleasure. (In Sorority Row, you feel in on the joke; here, the movie is the butt.) Misplaced snark palls on me fast, but if a pure-at-heart ninja yarn doesn’t invite sarcasm, I don’t know what does. McTeigue’s naïveté worked for V for Vendetta—which, like this film, the Wachowski brothers produced—but that was an old-timey swashbuckler: idealized anarchism. Between the bubble-brained acting, the founts of blood and treacle, and the whipping of children’s feet at a Hogwarts for magic masochists, Ninja Assassin is anarchy of a different kind.

But, as Susan Sontag pointed out, “Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (‘camping’) is usually less satisfying.” McTeigue may be the mainstream cinema’s last innocent; I haven’t seen this much Camp since I was a Boy Scout. But his work is satisfying. Though it may assassinate a few brain cells as collateral, Ninja Assassin is also an excellent killer of time; and in its own unpretentious way, it respects its audience—or at least that solitary man in front of me, who cheered the movie on the whole way through.