American Ninja

Today, you just have to shake your head at the fact that this exercise in futility with horribly wretched action scenes could become a hit and a much-lauded classic of pirate video distribution in Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, the reasons for that are obvious. Though American Ninja comes across as serious and heroic, its style of action and concept of what it means to be a ninja is a comic-bookishly naïve fairy tale that mixes action, exoticism and pseudo-mysticism that will make even little boys roll their eyes. The popularity of the film and its sequels was significantly aided by the limited market at the time – Van Damme was still begging Cannon for his first film and Hong Kong movies were still a few years away from getting video distribution in Europe and elsewhere. And so Michael Dudikoff, a wooden actor with zero charisma, could become a star and a film with mediocre action sequences, where the editing and camerawork attempt to conceal the utter lack of choreography and the physical ineptitude of most of the cast, could become a hit. This sorry situation is thus even worse for the excellent Steve James, whose vitality, charisma, playful exaggeration and real martial-arts skills upstage Dudikoff in every scene. Only because he was black, however, he didn’t get much more than supporting roles in Hollywood in the 1980s. (03/09/2015)

Although today I consider Michael Dudikoff to be absolutely wooden as an actor, I genuinely liked the first installment of this nonsensical series in my childhood and regarded it as a successful action film. Today, only the ninjas remain in my mind, training in groups and having differently colored uniforms, which is a bit sparse. (27/05/2007)

Michael Dudikoff was never a favorite of mine, perhaps because in my youth, I somehow managed to miss all of his movies, and I probably never saw him as the main character in a full movie. Now I'm making up for it, and I'm finding out that this is a fantastic action B-movie, which is well-executed, sometimes quite funny, and also appropriately romantic. (02/06/2016)