Did I miss some sort of faux-feminist edict that more movies must be made demonstrating that women are every bit as capable as their male counterparts at turning out mindless, ultra-violent, pointless crap? How else would you explain this waste of celluloid, especially on the heels of the recent, genuinely awful The 355?

Sam (Karen Gillan), a trained assassin abandoned by her trained-assassin mother (Lena Headley) when she was 12, must find and join forces with her mom and her ethnically balanced female cadre (the overqualified but under-employed Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh and Carla Gugino) of trained assassins known as “The Librarians,” to battle a vicious criminal syndicate and protect an innocent eight-year-old girl. Still reading?

I won’t recount the plot because I didn’t detect one other than a device on which to hang a steady slog of unmemorable set pieces featuring the above-mentioned bad-ass babes shooting, bludgeoning, knifing, blowing up or throttling a series of thugs apparently wanted for public ugliness. 

On the plus side, it doesn’t take itself too seriously (how could it?) and there’s some dark humor that’s momentarily satisfying. But to enjoy this you have to wade through a bland script and a lot of indiscriminate, repetitive killing. A lot. (114 min)