American Ninja

This movie originally came out in 1985 when i was a young teenager. Like many teenagers back then I was obsessed with martial arts and ninjas. This movie (like many others around that time) was made to profit off that obsession. I have not seen the movie since maybe 1986 or 1987. When i saw this was coming on TV i was stoked, remembering how fond I was of it. It took about 10 minutes for it to be painfully obvious that I didn’t have the most discerning eye in 1985. The action scenes are absolutely laughable. I know we (Americans) didn’t know much about martial arts in the mid ’80s but wow was this bad martial arts. Action movie directing has gotten substantially better in the last 15 years or so but realizing that Jackie Chan’s Police story was made in the same year as this, shows there was good martial arts direction going on back then.

So the martial arts was pretty bad. The action editing was bad. The acting was pretty bad (even from some known good actors). The story and writing (especially the dialogue) was bad. Despite all of this, the movie was not too bad. I mean it won’t win any awards but it was better than some $100 million crap fests that come out today. It was 100 time better than the random Lifetime movie. It might just be bad enough to use as a revenge movie when your wife or girlfriend makes you watch the notebook, but maybe not good enough to waste your action movie night on.It has the production value of a high end B movie. It is not Asylum bad but not big budget either.

This movie made over $10,000,000 with a budget of $500,000 which shows you how much young people were into ninjas back then. This is a huge cheesfest but in the end is a decent bit of fun, despite the contrived and easily guessed plot and bad acting.

My rating 6.0 out of 10

Here is the trailer.

Never Back Down

I must admit that i am a big fan of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) and was intrigued yet cautious when i heard about this film. It ended up being pretty much what i expected, a modern day Karate Kid. It gave me more than i expected in some areas though. I was pretty happy with the MMA aspects of the movie. it was not entirely true to life (well some things were way wrong) and that bothered me   times. One in particular was when a fighter was in a triangle choke he picked up the other fighter and slammed him on the concrete and the other fighter had no major ill effects from it. If you were to really be slammed on your back like that onto concrete you would be hurt badly and bleeding from some pretty bad road rash. If you don’t understand what i just said, just know it is not all realistic.

When i say this is a modern day Karate Kid, know that i am not exaggerating. At times it really seems like the movie studio hired the writer and told him to write The Karate Kid with MMA. Judging from the writers credits he seems like a write for hire kind of writer (this is not a bad thing by the way) so this is most likely true, but he honestly did a pretty good job with most of it. If i were a young person i might like this more than i liked Karate Kid when i was a kid. The movie follows Karate Kid plot lines all over though. Boy moves to new town, meets girl he likes. Said girl’s boyfriend is a bad ass jerk that kicks our hero’s ass. Hero trains with awesome guy that offers sage advice. Boy enters tournament to fight jerk and put him in his place. Boy gets injured in the tournament but continues on. Any of this sound familiar?

All those similarities aside I really did enjoy many parts of this film and never really thought about stopping it.   scenes were done pretty well with some being done very well. i really liked the idea of on-line video sharing playing a big part since i think it would in real life if such a story happened in real life, although i think if real names and fights were posted on-line the police might get involved. I think the MMA stuff was much closer to real life than the Karate was in old movies like Karate Kid and the like and that helped my enjoyment, but i would still like to see an even more realistic approach and show the real pain and heartache real fighters go through. I really hope this leads to more MMA movies and with the rise of UFC it might very well do that. So in the end it wasn’t in any way the best action movie i have seen this year, it was very watchable and perhaps even rewatchable.

My rating 7 out of 10

Here is the trailer.