Movie Review: American Ninja

Dear Michael Dudikoff,

I’ve been a fan of yours for many an aeon (or at least the quantification of a singular spin on the Earth’s rotational rump), but this is my first time writing you. I should say, this is the first epistolary that can be met with the applause of empiricism, for I feel I have written you many times in the past - an extent so elongated that every thought to have glided across the tundra of cognizance seems to have aimed its tentacles in your direction.

Directly, or indirectly. Via the belts of excessive allegory, or the geography of Ulan Bator. They’ve acted as some sort of enigmatic tribute, a ceaseless ego caress, to your deep-rooted merits. Merits, I can only guess, that were tessellated into the omniscient fragments of Dudikoff by a grand narrator back in some esoteric antiquity. How those appendages burrowed into each speck of overblown prose retched onto the digitalia by myself is unknown; it savours its mystery and I for one do not wish to enact theft on its abstract possessions.

No, that type of ignoble behaviour does not fellate my senses. Rather than solicit solutions to perplexing paradoxes, or squeeze out the satisfying rejoinders to metaphysical riddles, I’d prefer to fondle and shape your inner-voice for a few moments to the tune of American Ninja.

As you’re all too aware, this piece of cinema was spawned from the uterus of Cannon Films in 1985 (and how proud I am to share a birth date with such an event), and featured yourself smothered in the guise of Joe Armstrong, a rebellious upstart living as an armed forces peon in the swelter of the post-Nam, pre-Gorbachev Cold War, in the rurality of The Philippines. With edgy histrionics, various military shipments are being pilfered by armed insurgents and a bunch of local ninjas, often leaving behind a slipstream of cadaveric extras.

With the escalation of iniquity in the Pacific tropic, you enter to rescue the days and the nights from the peccant fingers of our big bad personage, the arrogant Ortega — presumably some supercilious reference to Daniel Ortega, but we’ll ignore that as I’ll assume that the red lineages of the Sandinistas swerve around your capillaries from nightfall to sunset.

Article Author: Aaron Fleming

Aaron Fleming is a waster and an idler - prone to pomposity - forever enchanted by the filmic, the sonic, words and the aesthetic - given to the most ludicrous appraisal of Culture's finest icons and compositions. He resides in London.

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