American Ninja 2: The Confrontation

Dudikoff's character becomes incredibly mediocre and uninteresting in this film, simply just another action hero among many. His rougher and more inaccessible portrayal from the first film is completely forgotten, with a lot of emphasis on humor this time, which is okay only in some places. The fights are good in some places, not so great in others, just like the plot, which is fragmented by stupidity a lot. (06/03/2016)

This sequel is a case of stepping into the same river for the second time, but it’s even more laddish and comic-bookish than the original. The second American Ninja is about a kidnapped scientist who creates an army of genetically enhanced ninjas for a drug baron. The admittedly insipid premise is combined with general exaggeration and spiced up with humorous brief scenes, thus bringing Cannon Films’ ninja movies to their ideal form. Unfortunately, the key names of the creative team – Michael Dudikoff and Sam Firstenberg – comprise the obstacle that prevents the film from achieving the perfect form of an action comedy. All of the humorous sequences are handled by the great Steve James, a trained actor, martial-arts practitioner and former stuntman who, due to the colour of his skin, never got the opportunity to play a lead role and was relegated to the sidekick category. As in his other acting jobs, here he outshines Dudikoff in every scene because he doesn’t take his role seriously and is able to dig into a scene with verve. Like Robert Clouse, director Sam Firstenberg proves himself to be a bumbling journeyman who gained fame as an action director, but did so only because of the work of choreographers and capable actors. After collaborating with ambitious filmmakers like Sho Kosugi and dance geniuses on the Breakin’ series, the futility of his staging is made obvious by the films on he did not collaborate with a similar class of creators. American Ninja 2 characteristically exhibits relative skill in the shooting of the scenes, but all of the action is either hopelessly unimaginative and routine or, in the best case, hackneyed borrowings from somewhere else (e.g. a Spencer Hill-esque bar brawl and a scene involving a car that is strikingly reminiscent of Kosugi’s work in both Revenge of the Ninja and Mad Max 2). (10/11/2015)