And that quote pretty much sums this movie up.

So the basic premise is that our Hero, Joe Armstrong (Michael Dudikoff) and his trusty sidekick are Army Rangers called in by the US Marines to a remote Caribbean island where Other marines have been going missing. It turns out that they have been kidnapped to harvest DNA so that a local drug lord can clone an army of ninjas for his personal command.

What. A. Crock.

Okay -- so I’m one of the Geek Speakers who loves B-grade action flicks... but even I had to really push myself to make it all the way through American Ninja 2.

I mean on the surface, what doesn’t this movie have to offer? Ninjas, genetic cloning, stuff blowing up, Caribbean islands and the costuming that a tropical paradise promises. And with it being a sequel of a terrible movie, surely your expectations are low enough from the outset to make watching it at least mildly amusing.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Apparently I have no understanding of cloning. Whilst this isn’t massively surprising, I have now learnt that the basic idea is that you take a Marine, then clone them, tweak some DNA type things, and suddenly you have super ninjas. That’s right, we have all been misled, those suckers that have been training in various martial arts for years to learn an art are fooling themselves. They simply don’t have the ninja gene. This leads onto all sorts of wonderful ideas (like the possibility of locating the elusive pirate gene) but we’ll leave that for another time. What makes these cloned “Super ninjas” even more gut wrenchingly awful however, is their lack of any martial arts skills. Sure, most of them have completely mastered the ancient “jump off something high and yell” technique, and pretty much all of them had the secret “letting the other guy hit me” block downpat, but beyond that? Nothing. These guys were nothing more than your run-of-the-mill comedy relief thug. You know, the henchmen that are just there to make the good guys look like they kick more ass than they are actually capable of? That’s these guys to a tee.

To make matters worse, these super ninjas, the ones bred to never feel fear, to not feel pain... apparently if you hit one, and tell him to stay down... he will.

So we have a millionaire drug lord, with an army of (exceptionally bad) ninjas. You know what the military have (one would presume)? Guns. Boatloads of high-powered, automatic, grenade-launching blow-your-shit up guns. You know what sucks when you’re a ninja? Being shot. But instead of that, our hero sneaks inside, lays some smackdown, and THEN the other half dozen good guys decide to do something and blow some stuff up.

Another thing I learnt from this movie: apparently mediocre fireworks make acceptable substitutions to any kind of actual special effects. How much money did they spend on hairspray and bendable rubber swords (seriously, they’re everywhere) that they couldn’t afford anything other than bottle rockets for gun effects?!

To summarize:

This movie is about ninjas -- clone ninjas. And there are two things* it fails to deliver with any credibility: ninjas and clones.

   -- Jason Murdoch


*Apart from decent acting, script, special effects, or the other standard things we expect in a movie.