Ninjas!...Pure awesomeness distilled into human form. Humanity’s end game, as far as children of the ‘80s are concerned – Naturally, I am talkin’ of pop culture ninjas, that unique evolution which has next to nothing to do with traditional Japanese ninjutsu. In actuality covert spies and assassins, the ninja most emphatically did not race around in black pajamas. Really, the less you look like a ninja, the more you look like a ninja, and vice versa. Furthermore, ninjas were elite warriors, no doubt, but they weren’t literally invisible, could not shapeshift or multiply or command legions of animals to do their bidding.
Don’t tell that to Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the Israeli madmen who in the 1980s turned Cannon Films into the most prolific peddler of mediocre action spectacles the world has ever known, a sort of high market variation on The Asylum. The 1980s’ action had a reputation for bulged, muscled gun-toting mental defectives, and it surely didn’t originate with Golan and Globus (aka the Go-Go Boys), nor did they perfect the form (see Commando), but their prolificacy no doubt cemented the image. And so the popular conception of the ninja, another action hero Go-Go celebrates, is now victim to the same sort of image tinkering.
But let us still not ascribe any originality to Cannon Films – not when the company was founded upon the principle of buying up crap scripts proper studios wouldn’t touch unironically. The ninja’s status as a pajama-clad master of all things Asian can be traced further back. In Western popular culture, at least, to You Only Live Twice. Before then, Japan was already perverting the ninja into a thing of unwitting awesomeness…That whole black pajama thing, that’s the uniform of Japanese stagehands. Ignored in theater productions, audiences would think people so clad invisible on stage – hence, ninjas appear likewise, and earn their mythical reputation for ridiculous stealth.
So now we’re into the ‘80s again, with ninja madness spreading like some wonderful, wonderful virus. Where’d this come from? (Unplanned, uninformed theorizing to follow…) Could be from the previous decade’s rise of purer martial arts films, dependent upon skilled stars like Bruce Lee. In this, Americans (i.e. Hollywood) could not compete, neither capable nor accustomed with delivering such exquisite fighting. Ah hah, but toss a guy in a baby blue one-piece pajama, and you’ve got a ninja! An actor’s (or stuntman’s) martial arts skills needn’t be extraordinary, because his identity alone – ninja – is more than enough justification for badassery. …Besides, those face-concealing PJs make it so much easier to trade uncharismatic actors for unskilled stuntmen – a budget-saving measure that’d surely appeal to Cannon’s Hebrew duo, no doubt the perfect men to deliver Asian martial arts to the West.
One’s impression is that American Ninja (during production called American Warrior, making this one of the best name upgrades ever, because ninjas) is the gold standard of Cannon’s dozens of ninja epics. At the very least, it has the most sequels – the best indicator of quality, right? Even in this field, it’s by no means the first – Limiting ourselves to director Sam Firstenberg’s career leading up to American Ninja, we find Revenge of the Ninja (1983), Ninja III: The Domination, and – holy godballs! – Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1985)! (That last one is a thematic outlier, but oh so indicative of the great, oozing, melting, warm and lightly burnt cheese that is American Ninja.) The man surely knows his ninjas…or at least is quite impressively ignorant about them.
Cannon, a bottom line-driven studio (which is saying something, among studios), were no doubt looking to American Ninja as a series starter, not because there’s anything special about American Ninja (excepting ninjas), but because they looked to all their films as series starters. And when, for instance, you’re coincidentally making two Chuck Norris Vietnam flicks, and realize one nicely follows the other, it’s simple enough to redub Norris’ name and call the better one (made first, surprisingly) Missing in Action 2. All Go-Go casting is done with a mind towards franchise headliners…on a budget.
Thus American Ninja is the wheelhouse of one Michael Dudikoff, whose former claim to fame is a minor role in the former year’s Bachelor Party. Oh, and he also knows a scant amount of martial arts! Yeah, that’ll do, call the man a ninja, and we’re all set.
An American ninja, mind you, because the inescapable fact is that Dudikoff is Caucasian – this is the extent of his performance, really, as the Duder is otherwise a fantastic black hole of charisma. But he’s white, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that Americans are best at everything. (I say, eyes rolling.) It seems conceptually an offense against Japanese culture to hijack a tradition in this way, then to pit the Duder against “the world’s only top-flight ninja outside of Japan” and have the Duder triumph inarguably. To assert this would be like suggesting a Japanese could beat an American at one of our pastimes, like excessive eating. Oh wait…
Michael Dudikoff is Pvt. Joe Armstrong (now there’s a blandly generic action hero name). Incongruously, American Ninja is set in the Philippines, and concerns a U.S. Army base’s ongoing struggle against a local ninja faction. The fallout of both Vietnam and WWII somehow informs this scenario, though…more likely one could perhaps find many Cannon films from 1985 with a similar setting, and when a better answer isn’t obvious, let’s always fall back on money.
As part of that cheapness, let’s accept the relative lack of a script. Maybe that’s the reason Dudikoff rarely ever speaks, and evinces no more personality than his stuntman brings to the table. Hence the issue with employing Dudikoff as your ersatz Jackie Chan. Surely, Duder’s Joe has no background – nothing to inform a character. Jumping into the later character revelations – because the central action plot about evil ninja smugglers is so ’80s basic, you’ve already assumed it – we learn Joe has amnesia. That’s a simple way to indicate “arbitrary plot twist in the third act,” but it’s also a way to account for Joe’s emotional shallowness. Personalities develop over time, and all Joe recalls from his pre-amnesia days is ninja – what a simple way to account for maximum action heroics on minimum anything else. (It’s like the strange efforts some movies make to account for Jean Claude Van Damme’s Belgian accent.)
On a routine Army convoy – so routine, it seems wholly without purpose (for now) – even transferring the Colonel’s daughter Patricia (Judie Aronson) for no reason – the local rebels ambush. Army men all surrender with schooled cowardice…except for Joe! With barely any prompting, he outright kills a dude with a screwdriver (not that exciting). But then…
Enter NINJAS! Black-clad mooks emerge from the palms, and kill everyone. Except for Joe. And Patricia. And assorted Commanding Officers who need to be the “angry police chief” to Joe’s “guy who plays by his own rules” later on. So they don’t actually kill all that many people. And Joe kicks ninja butt (being himself an American ninja), escaping all ninja-like into the trees with Patricia – whose thoroughly arch high maintenance pre-Paris Hilton bitchiness (a trait she loses after but this one-scene attempt at characterization – making her the most rounded character) is so utterly non-ninja. “Who do you think I am, a jungle baby or something?” But Joe is such a marvelous ninja, even saddled with this albatross, he outwits half a dozen Asianer ninjas, escaping over your average ninja’s one weakness: water. Really, there’s no reason these henchman couldn’t ford that river, when even Patricia could!
Joe and Patricia recover in the jungle, in that bickering sort of way all action couples do – they hate each other now, but love is inevitable. Only imagine this scenario as played by an uncharismatic minor actor from Tron, and a girl who was last seen getting stabbed through the chest by Jason Voorhees. And with sufficient cheese grated onto this tasty pizza, it seems we’re set for our film – two jerks evading and battling ninjas in the forest. It’s elegant and simple, which makes up for the stupidity.
Except…except one cut later, Joe and Patricia are back on the base, having hitchhiked there (it’s almost a running gag that hitchhiking follows ninja antics). So that was all a big waste, except it arbitrarily inserts Joe into your standard action movie template from here on out. Only without plot. Here’s what’s been accomplished:
• Joe and Patricia are our desultory romance, because damn it, all movies need a romance glommed on. Because no woman would watch a movie for sheer sub-moronic ninja-y goodness, but they do love love, romance, never mind that’s very reductive of the gender. Making it very appropriate for action.
• More importantly, Joe now has enemies – Victor Ortega (Don Stewart), the Hispanic smuggler that is automatically an action movie’s villain when no greater idea exists. Any less creativity, and he’d be a drug smuggler – which I honestly thought he was, until by the end it turns out he’s smuggling weapons, stolen from the U.S. Army (hence the convoy holdup has some purpose – more on that anon). And while Joe is presently concerned with nothing more than uselessly moping about in that angsty action hero sorta way, it’s Ortega who antagonizes him, demands him dead (at the hands of the nameless Master Ninja - Tadashi Yamashita). Hero’s doing nothing, so the villains’ unfocused violence creates the plot.
• Finally, Joe’s superiors at the base yell at him. They hold him back, occasionally court martial him or hurl him in the brig. It’s simply a stalling technique, to increase the amount of stale, non-ninja scenes. Not because there’s any value in it, even as relief, but so we can reach feature length.
That’s the setup, allowing for scenes of A) dumb romance to no end, B) classical 1980s homoeroticism on base twixt Joe and Curtis Jackson (Steve James, supplying the other romance), and C) ninja action. Ninja action is the thing of interest, so here’s what American Ninja offers in that arena (so that you, the consumer, can make an informed film-watching decision):
• Joe fights Curtis Jackson, to prove ninjutsu’s inarguable superiority to all other modes of existence. Somehow, this means Joe must place a bucket over his head and smack Curtis Jackson around with a wet mop, and I’m thankful for that.
• Joe is summoned to a warehouse by the docks, somehow not realizing that warehouses always mean action sequences. So he fights – and kills – many ninjas. With alarming ease.
• Giving his ninja bushido chi kwon do, or whatever, a rest, Joe engages a Jeep truck in a super low budget variation on that chase scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark – look to ‘80s action films, and you’ll find dozens of variations on that sequence.
• Which leads Joe to another warehouse, for all the rafter-based ninja wackiness they didn’t already serve up. He also faces down some dudes with guns, who prove (unsurprisingly) entirely less competent than the various multi-colored pajama guys. And now I realize it’s all a live action variation on “Ninja Gaiden.”
• Master Ninja fights Joe at the base, to no end. Hilariously, multiple U.S. soldiers die violently by act of ninja. (I would not want to be in this squadron!)
• The climax, which involves…A ninja obstacle course. Ninjas clad in black, red, yellow and blue (in broad daylight – ninjas only wear white at midnight, which seems…counterintuitive). Whatever military hardware the filmmakers had lying around. A helicopter. A koi pond. A rocket launcher. Marble statues. Deadly, deadly swing sets (feeling like something outa Gymkata)! And ninjas ninjas ninjas NINJAS! Joe kills them all!
Actually, ninja murder is so easy for American ninja Joe Armstrong, I suspect some card stacking at play. It goes Joe > Ortega (who, while knowing no martial arts, is a great badass by sheer dint of his villain status) > Master Ninja > other ninjas > anyone in the U.S. military > dudes with guns. Yes, do not carry a gun in American Ninja, not if you want to live. Eh…unless it’s the climax, and you’re Curtis Jackson (who is given to calling himself by his full name, so I guess that’s another “personality”). When that time comes, Curtis Jackson just throws on a Rambo II headband, artfully rips his fatigues to highlight maximum musculature, and mows ninjas down with molten goddamned steel, motherfucker! Basically, this is a sop to viewers more interested in gun-fu than kung-fu.
And, not that we’re keeping a tally or anything, but getting deeper into the ninja nitty-gritty, what do these noble goons use as their weaponry?
• Swords
• Arrows
• Nets
• Chains
• Sais
• Scythes
• Darts
• Spears
• Ninja stars
• Flash bombs
• Actual invisibility, ensuring laughability
Did I miss anything?
Towards the climax, add to this heady gumbo of lunacy a few plot explanations. Thankfully, they’re never too intrusive, which is the nice thing about stupidity – ignorance is bliss, dumb stories are also terse. So the inevitable truth about Joe’s amnesia flits about, couched mostly in the midst of an action sequence! His master, now Ortega’s undercover landscaper (how convenient!...and random!), was once (or still is) a Japanese holdout from WWII – With ninjas like this, how’d they lose the war?! Encountering a white baby randomly in the jungles of the Pacific (cue flashbacks), our unnamed future landscaper turned him into a ninja, just for the sheer hell of it. Words like “honor” and “destiny” get tossed about as artlessly as retconning in a sequel, and really, did we need logic underlying our American ninja?!
The other late-stage plot revelation: Many of the Army’s higher-ups are in collusion with Ortega, as far as weapons smuggling is concerned. They’re OK with this, as a tactic to battle the domino effect of the dread Communism – Vietnam ripples and all, and the glorious effect Ronald Reagan had upon action cinema. And now we understand the functional pretense for that initial convoy…though Lord knows what the Colonel makes of the dozens of his own soldiers his ninja brethren kill per week. There’s some moral dubiousness here, a shockingly high body count with zero weight to it, but it wouldn’t be an action movie without it. (Ah, the ‘80s, when an R-rating was a draw!)
To no one’s surprise, American Ninja is not a good movie. Oh, but it’s entertaining! It’s also brain-damagingly stupid. As an action film, it’s something of a bust. The martial arts is purely what you’d expect of two cash-strapped Israelis, too busy making 41 other lackluster action films that year to fully devote their energies to this one. There is no chance of feeling that mighty rush of adrenaline, as in the best action films – your Enter the Dragons and Die Hards, where the viewer emerges wishing to emulate the hero. No one wants to be Michael Dudikoff.
Divorced of these action necessities – and I doubt American Ninja’s audience even in 1985 got much legitimate thrill from it – American Ninja is free to work as a cartoonish bit of nonsense. It is gigglesome, straddling the strange paradox of knowing, but not winking about that fact. This is a trying balance, the sort of tone Commando is so great at. And when you want that sort of ‘80s experience, but tire of guys, guts and guns, well, this’ll do. It has ninjas!
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