Enter the Ninja

Enter the Ninja, which kicked off the fad of American-style ninja films in the 1980s (as opposed to the tradition of Japanese ninja films of the 1960s), was conceived as a desperate knock-off of Bruce Lee’s legendary The Way of the Dragon and, at the same time, is the perfect antithesis of Lee’s film. Both movies depict the arrival of a martial-arts master in a foreign land to visit his loved ones, expats who face oppression at the hands of local thugs because an unscrupulous businessman has laid claim to their home/land. However, Bruce Lee’s masterpiece depicts martial arts as a tool not only of personal defence, but primarily as a kind of national heritage that will help Chinese emigrés win respect and strengthen their national pride. The fact that Lee was an actual practitioner of martial arts (though he preferred different fighting techniques in the movie than in real life because they were more effective on film) also played an essential role, which elevated the result from the level of genre fantasy into the realm of a breathtaking display of the physical abilities of the human body. In contrast to that, the creators of Enter the Ninja (for variety, the title sponges off of Lee’s last hit, Enter the Dragon) limited their knowledge of martial arts to what they had seen in a handful of films, and it is obvious every step of the way. The lead role eventually fell to Franco Nero, who possesses an almost unexpected physicality, but even his sincere effort cannot overcome the fact that the “choreography” was clearly limited to the instruction to “now just get out and fight”. The highlight of the improvisation is a painfully ridiculous passage involving Nero’s training with nun-chucks, which combines movements adopted from drying his back with a towel and grimaces practiced while taking a shit. The martial arts are transformed into a comic-bookish fantasy for kids (including the colourful costumes, the hysterically overacting bad guy and his deformed lackey), where instead of physical skills, the main attractions are surreal ninja gadgets and weapons (some of which peculiarly have nothing to do with ninjas or are used in a way other than their actual intended purpose), camera tricks and absurdly, ignorantly rendered exoticism. Unlike Lee’s emancipatory role, which resonated with minorities, the diaspora and the nation as a whole, the protagonist of Enter the Ninja comes across as a typical macho hero from Cannon Films productions, for whom fighting skills are merely an extension of his inherent guyness, coolness and machismo, which have the main secondary effect of enticing the opposite sex, including married ladies. Enter the Ninja is a characteristic product of its director and producer, Menahem Golan. Primarily an egocentric film enthusiast, Golan was obsessed with the endeavour to create his own equivalent of a classic-era Hollywood studio, which he did indeed manage to do with Cannon Films, but he also longed to build his portfolio from his own equivalents of successful and canonical films, while lacking the critical detachment and professionalism that would have enabled him to take quality into account and to conceptually develop a quickly dashed-off pitching concept into a functional whole. Thanks to all of these aspects, Enter the Ninja is a marvellously campy spectacle, where enthusiastic irrationality mixes with childish inventiveness, a bit like the films of David A. Prior, from which this trashy gem differs only in its bigger budget (instead of a forest behind the house, we have the era’s main destination for C-movie productions, the Philippines) and slightly better craftsmanship. (20/12/2014) (less) (more)