American Ninja

OK, so it's a movie my friends and I could have made in the backyard. But keeping that in mind, it's fairly good for what it is. It's entertaining in a cheesy sort of way.

You can guess the plot line--a few cops and Steve the Buff Hero set out against an army of "nin-ja!" bent on an evil scheme. Still, it wasn't *all* completely predictable...

In short, the best thing to do with this movie is to get a group of friends together, watch it, and jump in with MST3K-style comments whenever it seems appropriate.

3/10 for the movie, but hey, I had fun.

If you are watching this film, you obviously have an appreciation for ninja film. This is a good start; compared to real films, this film is atrocious. I won't waste my time going into explaining why. A similarity can be drawn with pornography; the viewer forfeits acting, plot, cinematography, whatever, for the subject matter. If you watch this film, you want to see ninjas, and that is what you get. The end fight is great, some good training scenes, and the film is enjoyably ornamented with ninja mythology. People disappearing in clouds of smoke, walking under sand, flying through the air, committing hari-kari. The film has some great ideas, and should be watched with an open mind.

After such a silly opening, I knew this was going to be some great (very) b-grade nin-ja hokum. Be prepared to be bemused and to cop a lot (and I mean a lot) of ninja mumbo jumbo. "Be the ninja". "masters of deception". "The way of the ninja". And this goes on. I even lost count how many times the word 'ninja' was said. Yep pretty much everything out of the ninja hand book is mentioned. There's a few novel ideas (like the disappearing in smoke act to the strange hole digging) lurking within too. I guess you already take it that what you're going to get from this bare-bones production with ninjas is something ham-fisted, tacky and disjointed. But on the other end of that spectrum it's fast paced, outrageous and undeniably entertaining. Just simply admire the graceful, cunning and liveliness of the ninja, as they pose, preach their masterful ninja ways, run around a bit in the secret ninja fashion and pose some more, but eventually spare some time to show off their skills and many different deadly and unusual weapons.

Hell this is crazy! And it gets a lot weirder and definitely downright convoluted the further along it goes. The clunky script is laughable (everyone has a plan.), the paper-thin plot is completely whacked-out (which has some ninjas stealing some secret documents (which are obviously labelled 'Classified: Top Secret') for their ninja master Kurodo to pass onto some scientists so they can create some zombie-like fighters to take over the world (don't ask me how that works?). The police are on it, and one of them gets some help from his friend as he knows of the ninja ways) and the performances are lousy. But that's part of the charm. Anyhow Ken Watanabe is such a badass! Ron Marchini is totally monotone in the lead, but surprisingly amusing. Sweeping through it is a noisy, erratic music score with an eastern tone, but still gives the air some cracking energy when the action erupted. The stunt work and choreography isn't first-rate, but it's so uncanny and cheesy. Plus it does have some decent blood splattering, and deaths. Director John Lloyd does what he can do with such little resources (wait for a whopping explosion of gigantic proportions).

Stupendous, brisk and enthusiastic trashy ninja fun.