American Ninja 4

AMERICAN NINJA 4: THE ANNIHALATION, Jody Abrahams (standing left), seated from left: Michael Dudikoff, Ken Gampu, 1990, © Cannon Films

Ok. I watched this alone and it wasn’t as entertaining as it would be with other brain damaged friends.

Nothing makes any sense in this movie. There is the main guy, Bradley, from American Ninja 3 that almost immediately gets captured by the bad guy and is stuck in prison the whole movie. Then Dudikov, the main guy in American Ninja 1 and 2, only appears about 50 minutes into the movie. Naturally he saves the day on his own. The plot about Bradley is of no consequence. But who cares? Nothing makes sense.

The bad guy is an Arab guy that doesn’t talk or look like an Arab. Obviously he is a terrorist. He owns a crew of ninjas and they do terrorist things in some fictional country that supposed to be based in Africa. He trains his ninjas all the damn time. Part of the training is the event called death where you can easily die when doing a regular chop maneuver. So why would the Arab want his own men to die for no reason? Who knows? Nothing makes any sense. He makes them dress up in different colour ninja uniforms for no reason. They also happen to own a prison and captured 4 people recently. Who knows what they were doing up to now.

For no reason there is a bunch of S&M hoodlums that live in a quarry with shitty cars. Like Mad Max. They get some random kid to find Dudikov and he must lead them to fight the bad guys. There was no explanation of why they have beef with the Arab or the ninjas. No explanation of why Dudikov was their main guy and why Dudi needs to help them. He was (badly) teaching kids English in some nearby African country.

All weapons were obvious bad props. The stick were made from paper towel rolls that were sprayed silver. You could see the diagonal lines where the roll joins itself. Then there was a guy with a thick club. It was floppy and had the same diameter of a pool noodle. I wonder how they made that prop?

Most of the scenes where: someone searching for someone else and encountering an enemy while doing it. Nothing that anyone does is of any consequence to the other teams. Why was this movie even made? I took $300k USD. Who knows the budget? Dudikov was popular and probably expensive. They saved a bit by not having Jackson. He was my favourite character in the series. Always kicking ass. They probably saved a ton of money by doing everything in one take. You know its one take when the actor forgets his line and they leave it in. They didn’t need to make this because there is no continuation of the series or build up to a grand finale. They’re basically the same movie as American Ninja 1 but with a different background and a slightly different cast and script. Maybe the script is identical and no one noticed.

So. I don’t know why it was made, but I know for sure that no one should watch this.