Low Budget

Movie Review: bad martial arts movies: American Ninja

Title: American Ninja
Director: Sam Firstenberg
Actors:Michael Dudikoff, Steve James, Judie Aronson


Iran Contra seemed to have it all: Rogue military operations, money and guns to a government that had held Americans hostage, illegal supply of weapons to insurgents because they were “fighting communism,” and, most importantly, a big-haired blond with documents in her bra. Yet it falls into a dead zone, far below Watergate, far, far below the Monica Lewinski Affair. Nobody has a made a good movie out of Iran Contra, even though it has almost every possible element.
What it was missing, what it clearly needed, was more Ninjas. Like this movie. American Ninja is oddly prescient, dealing with covert arms transfers through a shadow South American businessman, probably a drug-lord, to some organization fighting for “freedom” against Communism. But American Ninja, though lacking Fawn Hall, has Ninjas and that has made all the difference. Sequel after sequel after sequel. Could Michael Dudikoff possibly have had a career otherwise? He’d make a good looking robot, maybe, but isn’t menacing enough to be a terminator.
This is the kind of movie that harbors old clichés that have been temporarily exiled from better fare. You have the Japanese Master who for some reason likes the American Kid. You have the Woman Who is Too Vain to Understand Danger, “Do you know how much those shoes cost?” and you get The Man with No Memory. These clichés are patched together into a basic plot. Viewed from a long ways away the plot makes a certain amount of low-budget sense. But up close, the plot points are too thick, too ridiculous, too close to the edge of farce.
Then there’s the matter of the bad martial arts. Some of it is so badly staged you want to yell at the screen. Much of it is shot too poorly to see what might be going on. Mostly it’s punctuated with plenty of gunfire to at least keep you awake. At one point, after pulling out one of almost every Ninja weapon out of this wristband, the Bad Ninja suddenly fires a laser. He has a laser? Why didn’t he use that first? But at that point it’s too late to complain. The only real hope is that maybe, just maybe, that prison guard, number 258, I think, is really a young Samuel L. Jackson. Maybe it’s not, and you don’t get much of a look, but if it is that would be cool.
Why did I watch this movie, not once but twice? Well, my FRIEND Tom put this on his top ten list. I watched it once and sent it back, thinking: this is crap, I have nothing to say about this movie. Then the EDITOR of Breaking it Down sent a note listing movies we needed to see, and this movie was on it. AGAIN, I ordered it from Netflix. Again, I waited for some secret magic, some special scene. But no, it was still crap.
Tom explained to me that he first saw this movie when he was 13. He believed then, (and still does) that any movie with Ninja in the title was likely to be cool. When I was 13 I really liked a couple cheesy Italian Western comedies, My Name is Trinity, and Trinity is Still My Name. I’ve seen pieces of these somewhere since, and am pretty sure they suck. But today I saw a collector set of Trinity pictures, three of them. Only 12 dollars. So I bought them and, well, maybe they’ll be better than American Ninja. If not, there’s always E-Bay.

-Daniel H. Jeffers

posted by dan @ 8/24/2005 07:55:00 PM