There's nothing like a good bit of girl on girl kung-fu action. By equal turns sexy and brutal, without being erotic. It's a good thing Richard Jobson knows this, by creating Scotland's first genuinely entertaining chopsocky feature. Drawing on a skilled local crew, The Purifiers stands as a slick and cartoony pseudo remake of The Warriors, with a little of Bruce Lee's Game Of Death in structure.

An unnamed futuristic dystopian city (Glasgow's Science Museum by any other name) has been divided into zones of control, each with their gangs running off problems and miscreants. The Purifiers is the name given to a gang of Tae-Kwon-Do experts who act as vigilantes, combatting crime. Each city zone is connected by an infrastructure and one faction wants to assume power by uniting the gangs into a single force. The leader of this faction is called Moses (overplayed by Kevin McKidd - chillingly minimalist in Jobson's debut 16 Years Of Alcohol), who declares war on The Purifiers, when they reject his gleefully fascist overtones. And so, gang war erupts, blood is spilled and trust destroyed.

The design of the film is straightforward and yet cleverly skewed. Jobson's director of photography, John Rhodes, knows how to shoot for storytelling and action in the same breath. His visual schemes remind me of early Tak Fujimoto, with striking colour choices - electric blue, film blown and digitally bleached out for moments set in the past - memorable shots and unsubtle, but clever, cinematographic tricks.

The sound mixing is as delicate as a brick and that's both good and bad. The film has unmemorable guitar and rock music as backdrop for action. And buildup of bass and sudden silence is way overused for dramatic purposes, diluting it's impact. While, on the other hand, comic overuse of swishes and cracks for violent fighting works well in terms of parody and playfulness.

If I'm going to poke holes in the film, then it's by equal turns overwritten and underwritten. Jobson's script opens and closes with an oh-so-serious soliloquy, read against a montage of the moon, along with a CGI whizz-bang ride across the planets. It describes it as a bullet, beautiful and violent. I read it as a metaphor for the inevitability of gang war, as unvarying as the orbits of the planets. Pretty loose, don't you think?

The Purifiers themselves are an undistinguished lot, with little to separate them, aside from Gordon Alexander, the hero of the piece (and fight choreographer) and Dominic Monaghan, who's only memorable since he's a traitorous git, amid mild murmers of "What's a Hobbit doing here?". The characters have been underwritten to a near cypherous degree, and underplayed. What they are good at, however, is kicking some ass.

Is that enough? In this case, sure. However, I'm waiting for Jobson to break free from his low-budget rut and show me something truly memorable.