Revenge of the Ninja

Before Cannon Films found the ideal formula for cheap ninja action movies in the American Ninja franchise, it made a trio of very disparate films. With its box-office success, the first of these, Enter The Ninja, indicated that a boyishly naïve approach to ninjas and a comic-book interpretation of ninja mythology could fill a gap in the market, but Franco Nero, with his futile martial-arts fakery, was not the ideal choice for the lead role. Cannon’s second ninja flick rectified that deficiency by casting Sho Kosugi in the lead role. Kosugi, an actual practitioner of the ninja arts, portrayed the main antagonist in the previous film and had a hand in the choreography of the action scenes. Under his creative direction, Revenge of the Ninja became a unique expat action B-movie in American production. In addition to Kosugi and his son in the lead roles, the cast featured a number of Asian actors who relocated to the US (including, among others, Professor Toru Tanaka). The narrative revolves around the motifs of tradition and roots, which establish a national identity for the hero, who came to America from Japan, while for foreigners they represent only superficial enchantment and a commodity devoid of content. Besides that, Kosugi conceived the film as his own showreel for the purpose of establishing his image as a star. Though he was an actual martial-arts champion, like Bruce Lee he knew that film required spectacle and proper exaggeration more than realistic practical demonstrations. His choreography of the action sequences are in line with this, as it surprisingly has a lot in common with Jackie Chan’s work and even foreshadows Chan’s action films, where he began to systematically cement his image and work on his choreographic trademarks. Kosugi also bases his image on the fact that his hero is not a superhuman fighter, but an ordinary guy who, thanks to martial arts, is nevertheless able to defend his loved ones, even if he himself takes numerous blows in the process. The action is always situated in a distinctive setting whose elements are incorporated into the choreography – most strikingly in this respect is the scene on the children’s playground, which utterly evokes a sequence from Chan’s later Police Story 2. Kosugi also combines fighting with stunts that he performs himself, an approach that Jackie Chan adopted in Project A, which came out later that same year. It is true that Revenge of the Ninja cannot compare to the brilliant work of Jackie Chan and his team of collaborators in terms of the breadth of action, the detailed conceptualisation of the individual phases and the use of settings. On the other hand, Chan had a fundamentally more supportive environment for making his movies, as opposed to the cheap, quickly made flicks from Cannon Films, which raises the question of what kind of performances Kosugi would have achieved if he had had comparable conditions. Unfortunately, Revenge of the Ninja did not become a hit despite Kosugi’s ambition and, in the category of trash C-movies, a highly above-average action sequence, so Cannon Films henceforth always relied on white actors, and Kosugi, after playing a supporting role in the absurd mishmash Ninja III: The Domination, struck out on his own, which enabled him to play bigger roles again, though it further reduced the already low budgets of his films. (28.08.2015) (mniej) (więcej)