I love a good, dumb action movie, but when there’s no real purpose or nothing to propel it, things get stale really fast.

The major issue for interestingly-titled ‘Yakuza Princess’ is it’s a film without a compass, and therefore goes nowhere fast.

It follows the heiress to half the terrifying Yakuza crime syndicate, and the war she wages with the ones who want her dead and out of the picture.

She teams up with an amnesiac stranger who’s unaware of his role in thins, and their fates become inexplicably intertwined.

I’ll give the film this – it’s violent and blood-soaked, which is what one would expect from this type of affair. But there’s not much rhyme or reason to the violence.

Once considered top-tier talent, Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars with MASUMI, and neither are particularly memorable or impressive.

The story – which originated in Danilo Beyruth’s graphic novel Samurai Shiro – gets a lazy treatment from writer-director Vicente Amorim.

In the end, it’s a film that does little to convince us it’s anything other than derivative, and fails to generate much excitement.

1.5/5 Stars