I first watched American Ninja 2: The Confrontation over a week ago, in a helpless fit of advance juvenile ninja enthusiasm…and now I cannot bring myself to say anything about it offhand.
Needless, as a sequel in the great Golan and Globus superstar fun block party enterprise, American Ninja 2 doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with American Ninja. Oh, it does reunite Michael Dudikoff as Sgt. (née Pvt.) Joe Armstrong, and Steve James as Sgt. Curtis Jackson. And it’s still helmed by the first’s Firstenberg – though his career suggests he was gonna do a chintzy, ill-informed ninja movie one way or another. And by the Go-Go habit of amassing like-mindless reject ‘80s action scripts, The Confrontation was gonna get made one way or another. It just so happens that American Ninja was successful, by Go-Go standards ($11 million 1985 dollars), so the leads’ names are changed for efficient sequelization. Because all action heroes are interchangeable anyway. Still, makes it seem a non-cannon Cannon sequel.
American Ninja 2 doesn’t demand great investigation. Therefore, in my bizarre ninjaed-out funk, I’ll do the unthinkable…watch it again, and simply relate ninja antics as I find them – with a wise knowledge of where The Confrontation is headed (likely towards a confrontation)…
First, our setting: The Bahamas. I’ll burst your bubble right now and say ninjas never fight pirates. Instead we get totally tubular, bodacious ‘80s imagery, to the sort of music I imagine a vintage Nintendo Power would feature, were it a movie. It’s taking me a while to type this, because there’s a breadcrumb or something lodged under my “E” key and – aaarghh! Here’s what cleaning it out results in: wwwwwwwwwww3e3eawwwwwwwww3wweee4ee4ee Curses!
In all that, we’ve totally passed over the first fight (of dozens upon dozens), three beach bum Marines accosted randomly in a bar, as happens in action movies. And NINJAS haul them off!
Army grunts Joe Armstrong and Curtis Jackson arrive – I pause to nurse my aching thumb from smacking that “E” so hard – here to investigate routine kidnappings-via-ninja. Ignoring dumbass plot, for now it’s more eXXXtreme island culture – complete with anonymous bikini babes, which almost makes up for the latent homoeroticism between Joe and Curtis Jackson. Because mind you these are the only returning characters – Joe’s oh so deep romantic relationship with Patricia didn’t go anywhere. Makes that former time-wasting seem so essential!
Okay, in my habitual detours (and pauses to scratch myself), I’ve passed over exposition time with Captain “Wild Bill” Woodward (Jeff “Weston” Celentano), who requested Joe and Curtis Jackson help with his ninja infestation. Naturally, despite this request, Bill is instantly hostile, the usual “angry chief” type. But in dwelling upon “plot,” I ignore Bill’s appearance: Spiked blond hair, a bristled mustache, a sleeveless Hawaiian shirt over a neon lime green tank top with pink board shorts. Yes, there is something slightly fruity about this movie.
Speaking of: Assorted Marines take Joe and Curtis Jackson out for water skiing – and no icky girls allowed! Passing over plot complications which go nowhere, the boat “breaks,” stranding Joe and Curtis Jackson upon a rock- and ninja-strewn beach. Prompting Curtis Jackson to instantly strip off all his clothing, save for a single ill-fitting groin-cloth. Joe, meanwhile, is in a wetsuit, which is far more tasteful. And here indeed come NINJAS! Whoo!
Man, I’m hungry…
Stealth doesn’t quite work in these outfits, but who cares? Joe fights – er, if that six ninjas? Oh hey, the ninjas just made a human ladder to climb up a 20 degree incline – seems pointless. And now they’re choking Joe with a rope, one ninja’s face in his groin – yes, homoeroticism. Faster now – Spears. Swords. Arrows. Joe just tossed a stick into that dude’s nut sack!
Enter Curtis Jackson, sensing ninja-y shenanigans are afoot. Curtis Jackson uses a hook stick (?) to battle a ninja, with great ease. Despite Curtis Jackson’s complete lack of martial arts training (though he does possess one mean Jim Kelly grunt), he is superior to ninjas by dint of his co-lead status. Promotion by sequel. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaprom – don’t know what caused that. (My keyboard has problems and – fighting with nets! – the cursor is even randomly bar dudes pointlessly tough switching paragraphs without warning.)
Action scene then ends, as money and logic run out. Bill: “Ninja? What the hell are ninja?” It’s that part of the movie. Bill chews out Joe and Curtis Jackson (not in that way) about having battled ninjas. Why? Because. Also, “Ninjas my ass!”
A – pause to think of the best word – a traitorous pro-ninja Marine fields an ancient ninja message (via pay phone). His wise ninja masters demand that he kill Joe (and possibly Curtis Jackson, if he’s not too busy). Sure, why not.
The Blind Beggar bar, setting of ninja-by-way-of-Marine ambush. I can’t follow why, when dozens of ninjas failed to do Joe in, they’re sending in the local barflies, the randomly aggressive Australians (in the Bahamas?). Joe fights them, does some Van Damme-esque hot shit flips, and note that all minions pose the same threat – that is, none – be they ninjas or beach bums or (to anticipate ahead) freaking bio-engineered mutants.
Joe meets this Marine (Taylor) in a room. And here come…the same toughs Joe just defeated. To fight again. So they do. It’s kind of repetitive. What does surprise is that Taylor randomly gets a ten-foot-long ninja spear through the chest – and all this just after we learn “the Lion” (a drug smuggling mad scientist trillionaire!) has Taylor’s wife hostage. Oh well, I guess that whole wife thing was a bust after all, and Taylor’s potential plot-complicating double motivations are dead along with him.
“Action” sequence over, cue Bill. “This is really beginning to get on my tits!” Though the villain is known – the Lion, on Blackbeard Island (no pirates, somehow!) – our heroes cannot just go out there and end this movie. Again, just because. Man, this movie uses the same reasoning my parents once did!
Rather, what’s a good Police Academy-style awkward setup? How ‘bout, “There is a fancy dress soiree, and you’re demanded to hobnob with the snobby bluebloods and not cause a ruckus.” So glad this is how they’re occupying Joe and Curtis Jackson, because we wouldn’t want a ninja-filled ninja movie on our hands. Nope, we want to see Curtis Jackson flirt, to assure us Curtis Jackson is totally gay for women, and not for Joe. As, of course, Joe cockblocks Curtis Jackson to point out the Lion (Gary Conway, lookin’ like a villain outa Lethal Weapon 2, complete with Donald Trump toupee…oh, and he’s also the screenwriter, which just blows my mind away).
Oh God, this is the plot happy section, so enter Alicia Sanborn (Michelle Botes), Joe’s eventual “totally not gay for Curtis Jackson” love interest. She hollers randomly about island ninja kings and whatever other verbal diarrhea, and is then kidnapped just as randomly. (Not by ninjas – still pretty light on the ground, they are.)
What I enjoy about this movie (intermittently) is its lack of discipline. It aims to be a perfectly mainstream bit of normality, but it hasn’t the craft. This means that, without even trying to be weird, events are wont to turn wonky at a moment’s notice (and you’ve no idea where this thing is headed). Picture an old “G.I. Joe” cartoon, seen now through an adult prism, then made to awkwardly fit into an R-rated framework – simultaneously totally inappropriate for children, but altogether too infantile for adults. And in making this diatribe, I have totally disregarded the next interchangeable bar fight between Joe and those same Aussies, no greater a threat than before. Especially with Curtis Jackson in the mix. I suspect massive amounts of cocaine were responsible for this movie at some stage.
As a punch line to whatever all just happened, our post-fight heroes return to the hoi polloi party, to provoke monocle-droppings, and instigate another yelling fit from Bill.
Keep in mind there was no functional outcome to that last big fight – Alicia was not rescued, though she did somehow escape villainous clutches anyway. So, aided by Mr. Plot (a boy named Toto), Joe finds her in the same one block of beach town as thrice before, and…ninjas attack! See, the undisciplined zaniness that is American Ninja 2?
Joe defeats ninjas – with his cock (housed behind tight jeans), and I am not making this up. Then…ninja star. Dart. Random flaming oil drum death. Fruit cart bashed. Ninja wedgie!
Ho-John – sorry, Toto – arrives in a junker truck, despite how successfully Joe’s been de-ninjafying this alleyway so far. This is for the necessary automotive sequence, for those viewers who need a bit more hardware in their action cinema. And amidst “character” “dialogue,” a ninja leaps into the bed of this speeding truck with a grappling hook and battles Joe mid-chase (though there’s no evident reason why he continues to speed around). That same sub-Day of the Dead Casio soundtrack persists! Meanwhile, assorted innocent civilian motorists die violently, which seemed totally necessary. Then, ninja on the hood (!), there is only one way this scene can end…
Okay, are we done wasting time? Can Joe (and Alicia) finally go over to Blackbeard Island now?
Eh, after a nighttime “getting to know you” romanticalized interlude first. At least they don’t endure another tongue lashing (heh!) from Bill this time. I’m still hungry…
Back to the garden party (which is still somehow going on), to the same exact shot of the Lion et al just standing around. Was it necessary that I point this out?
Alicia’s exposition: Her father, a brilliant genetic scientist, is the Lion’s prisoner upon Blackbeard Island. “Dad ended up producing these attacking monster…these ninjas.” Oh yes, yes, YES, genetically-engineered super-ninjas, made from kidnapped Marines! Bless the ‘80s, when an idea like this wouldn’t seem bugnuts insane! Of course, “ninja” is something that can be reduced to a basic DNA level, so all this makes perfect sense.
The mutated ultra-ninja cat now out of the bag, we join the Lion in his chintzy lair (looking like something not even Cobra Kai would be caught dead in), to monologue about “the super ninja, the ultimate fighting machine. Strong! OBEDIENT! Heartless!” It’s time for a demonstration of super-ultra-mega-lightning ninjas, who visually look no different than all ninjas (because it’s likely the same dozen stuntmen), only…there’s an occasional orange pajama to break up the drab black. Needless to say, mutant ninjas don’t impress much in action, despite their rich intellectual promise.
(Meanwhile, Joe sneaks onto the compound. Hot Shots: Part Deux features the exact same sequence, basically.)
Ninja stars. Blow darts (wildly off target, mind you). Arrows caught in midair. The Lion’s chief ninja henchman (a Caucasian, naturally) battles the scads of just-born mutants. He kills damned near well all of them, which doesn’t do much for our ability to take these mutant ninjas seriously. It’s violent enough, it’d be disturbing with better gore, in a Kill Bill, Vol. 1 sorta way. I’m hungry.
Nonetheless, the Lion’s investors (cartoonish Libyan dictator types, mostly) are impressed anyway. And – scene!
Joe and Alicia disguise themselves in black ninja costumes (another reason why having an army of dudes in ostentatious pajamas isn’t a wise idea), to sneak into the crowd of investors currently learning about the scientific process of constructing ninjas in a test tube. (I never thought I’d get to write that particular run-on sentence.) Let’s allow Alicia’s father, Professor Sanborn:
“Micro-injecting DNA hereditary information into cell. By this process we can control the building blocks of life. We can make a human being anything we want it to be.”
Furthermore, “blah blah blah blah blah.”
All this while the cast strolls past pink, nude Marines in vats, ala Austin Powers, in the beninjafication process. Even from where it started, at some point this movie found a line we never realized existed, and crossed it. Then went another hundred miles. We’re beyond the looking glass here. Hilariously, all this seems to have been filmed at the local YMCA and – Joe’s fighting ninjas in a stairwell! Okay, he’s done.
“The Lion is shipping five billion dollars of pure heroin to the United States tomorrow. If that shipment gets through, nothing will ever stop him.”
Wait, what the fuck?! There was honestly no former hint about this development, and really, five billion?! And speaking of things that just happen with no warning, Joe starts flashing back to his two-minute meeting with his landscaper master in Part One (complete with flashbacks-within-flashbacks). With the slightest setup earlier in The Confrontation (where characters are but bipedal props), we might’ve had some warning for what comes next…Joe suddenly concentrates in the stairwell SO HARD he turns invisible – like that! (But not invisible to us, because Cannon cannot afford that.)
Okay, the pieces are in place for a lunatic climax – Curtis Jackson has even convinced the Marines to storm Blackbeard Island. Joe heads to the Lion’s ninja-killing chamber. He fights mutant ninjas – with the same ease as ever. As do those recently-freed kidnapped Marines, who weren’t made into mutant ninjas (so…who was?). Whatever. More swordplay, none of it differentiated (even in setting, combatants, etc.). Though Joe’s natural advantage – being an American – is no longer a factor, as mind you in this movie all the ninjas are Americans.
Curtis Jackson’s pyrotechnics go off outside, Cannon running through a #58-C battle sequence (before the stunt crew goes off to do the same thing for, presumably, Masters of the Universe). Anything counting as plot strands start to get resolved. That includes the ninja laboratory, where Sanborn kills both himself and the Lion – never mind the whole point of this incursion was to rescue Sanborn, if it results in another explosion, it’s “good.”
Curtis Jackson fights with battle machetes. Shirtless, he murders ninjas, while going “Oooyyy!” As Joe does likewise, with a sword, to the lead henchman – and despite this henchman’s Caucasian ethnicity, he’s named Tojo, which is so many parts unoriginal and racist, it’s unfathomable. That was all a little anticlimactic, but mostly because little could live up to the former revelations – mutant ninja mutant ninja mutant ninja mutant ninja!!!
Then a beach party epilogue assures us, via farewells, that this film shall have NO bearing on the greater franchise as a whole…not that American Ninja had anything like an arc to contend with in the first place.
This conclusion has the air of further adventures for Joe and Curtis Jackson. That’s not entirely true – though it’s too involved to get into now. It is Sam Firstenberg’s last time out, however. By 1987, Cannon Films was starting to come off of its wonderful heroin high which created hundreds of wonky action spectacles in a few short years. American Ninja, the series, has peaked (actually, it did in Part One, but don’t tell them that), as the theatrical market has moved beyond infantile ultra-violence with false promises of grandeur. For Cannon, financial hardships would limit their output to come. For Firstenberg, his subsequent résumé reads like a shortlist of Cannon’s future: Delta Force 3: The Killing Game, American Samurai, Cyborg Cop, Cyborg Cop II, and Operation Delta Force. (What, no Kickpuncher?) No American Ninja 3 in there either, sadly (?), as it’s time for someone new to don the pajamas.
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