This review is dedicated to Ryan Kenner, who’s been bugging me to see this for almost a year, and to the soldiers and planners of the American Revolution, especially if any of them were ninjas (not sure)

AMERICAN NINJA is not something I consider a classic, but it is a solid, enjoyable b-movie and it finally made me understand the Michael Dudikoff phenomenon. When I saw him in a much later movie, BLACK THUNDER (a Stealth bomber thriller remade as Seagal’s FLIGHT OF FURY) I was surprised at his lack of fighting. I assumed he was some karate champion or something like most of the ’80s action stars, but when I looked him up I found out he started as a model. No wonder.

But in this movie wouldn’t've noticed, because he does do plenty of fighting and makes it convincing. His line deliveries are sometimes bad but they manage to make him not talk very much. In fact, he doesn’t speak for the first 15 minutes of the movie, it almost seems like he’s mute.

Dudikoff plays Joe who, like Jason Bourne, has amnesia and doesn’t remember why he has extraordinary fighting skills. Unlike Jason Bourne he does not try to avoid fighting, he joins the army. While a new recruit he saves the colonel’s daughter from guerillas who are trying to hijack a shipment of weapons, and in true ’80s action movie fashion this gets him labeled as a troublemaker.

It turns out some of the higher ups are involved in the illegal arms trade, getting weapons to some criminal dude who has a private army of ninjas. He even has a ninja training camp where ninjas of all colors (black ninjas, blue ninjas, even yellow ninjas, who I guess would be good at hiding in a banana tree or in a field of dandelions) practice swords, flipping, climbing, and running between spiked punching bags. They have a giant, maybe ten or fifteen foot tall diagram of the human skeleton, maybe in case they have to fight a giant some day. (more…)

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