American Ninja 4: The Annihilation (1991)

I'll tell you why so serious

As Good As It Gets

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

*SPOILERS*SPOILERS*SPOILERS*SPOILERS I'm not sure if this movie is really better than "American ninja 3". At least that movie had Steve James as Curtis Jackson in it. This movie is a wasted opportunity. The idea of having 2 American ninja's is nice , but it's badly executed.The story here seems to be written for Steve James and Michael Dudikoff. David Bradley is pretty much a sidekick here and Dudikoff's character appears into the story when he is told that is "friend" is in trouble. There was no evidence that Dudikoff and Bradley were friends in any of the three previous movies ! We never heard or saw any of this friendship. The connection between Davidson and Armstrong in the movie is laughable. If you're expecting something like buddy cop movie you will be disappointed. Dudikoff and Bradley make a fighting team only in the last ten minutes (!) of the movie.It's bad that Steve James isn't in the movie , but I think it was a good decision for him . He wouldn't have much to do here. My stinky socks have more charisma and acting skills than David Bradley. Thankfully for a large part of movie he is kept off-screen. Michael Dudikoff gives a "I don't give a f***" performance. He obviously doesn't want to be in the movie and sleepwalks his performance.The plot is VERY slow moving. There is quite a lot of action , but it's all uninspired and dull. The editing in fight scenes is sometimes VERY bad. There is quite a lot of stupidity in the screenplay. Arab terrorist with ninjas guarding him ?! Thousands of Mad Maxish rebels couldn't defeat the bad guy until the American ninja came in ?! The Mad Max group really out of place in this movie. And why the bad guys didn't simply kill Bradley , but kept him alive ?! The good things about this movie ? It starts off with not-bad action sequence. There are some unintentionally funny moments. For example Dudikoff catches an arrow in his mouth and then kills a ninja . The ninja training obstacle when some of the ninjas have unintentionally funny death scenes. Or dialogues like : "It fills me with ecstasy to know that I was one minute from meeting Allah!" , "Where we headed?" "MECCA!" Too bad that they can't save this dreadful movie. I'm amazed that they made enough money thanks to this movie to make even "American ninja 5". I give it 1/10.

In part 4, the two American Ninjas, Joe Armstrong and Sean Davidson, team up to do battle against a terrorist and his band of Ninjas. It is always in people's nature to put down great things and to nitpick or sometimes just be plain mean. No matter what anyone says, this is utterly fantastic, an eye-popping cinematic treat. From an artistic standpoint, there were some plot elements and character developments I didn't think were totally needed. They do however drive the story, which seemed to be their purpose, so I can accept them. I am not saying the film is a classic, but I love it. My rating ends up being 7 out of 10.

People say American Ninja V is bad? That is 100% correct, but it's not as bad as this sequel is, I promise you. This movie takes itself completely serious, and suffers immensely for it; Cannon films have always been a hit and miss, but I've enjoyed a few of there films, mainly because they know how to incorporate humor into there movies. This sequel has none of that, and as a result, I had an experiencing that was very numbing. It doesn't help that the movie is very unexciting, with redundant fight scenes that fail to enliven the viewer. It's strange, because Dudikoff and Bradley do plenty of fighting, but none of it is that gratifying, other than a decent fight sequence in a bar, which is sadly too short. I will give credit to some brutal training sequences from the Ninja. We get an obstacle scene where the Ninjas have to walk over shards of glass, and avoid falling off into a pit of spikes, among other things. Watching a few of the guys fall on the glass shards made me cringe. The creativity was there to be used, but that was neglected for the most part. Michael Dudikoff phones it in. He appears around 45 minutes in, and doesn't have much dialog. He sleepwalks through everything, and does his thing with the fight scenes. It had potential for a decent team up between Dudikoff & Bradley, but they failed. Dudikoff says one word to Bradley in the entire movie and it was this. Armstrong (Dudikoff): Sean. You can find me at the school. David Bradley says in the movie that Dudikoff's character isn't much for words. No kidding! David Bradley is wooden as usual. His character gives way to Dudikoff for the most part in the second half, while Bradley is kidnapped. He is a great martial artist, I'll give him that. Jody Abrahams (Pango) is akin to Short Round from Temple of Doom, and that's not a compliment. Booth is actually a great baddie Final Thoughts: I hated this sequel. I'd rather watch American Ninja V three more times in lieu of go through this drivel again. The title is American Ninja 4: The Annihilation. Too bad it couldn't annihilate my boredom!2/10

After a quite disappointing third sequel, the fourth one did bring back some grace into the franchise (eventhough it didn't work out as I hoped). Steve James resignation for the fourth sequel (and if I'm not mistaken, this film was made before he passed away) in my opinion was due to the fact that the director decided to bring Dudikoff back after a setback in the third installmentFor me, the most interesting but could have used a little bit of polishing up in the film was the plot itself. A group of soldiers gets captured by an Arab and English terrorist building a bomb. The American government then sends Sean Davidson (David Bradley) to try and handle the situation and when he fails as well, they finally the send in the back the original kickass ninja pro Joe Armstrong (Michael Dudikoff) into the action since it was sort of like when everything else fails, Joe Armstrong doesn'tThis was a pretty interesting sequel and probably the 2nd best of the entire series behind Annilation. To get to this film, I have no real idea why Dudikoff agreed to return back to this fourth installment (maybe he did it just for the sake of the fans of the franchise) but thankfully, he really brought the life back into the series (and for fans like myself) even though he didn't seemed like he was in the mood of acting in this sequel. David's character in this sequel in my opinion was far more respectable than in the third one. He might have done a decent if not good job on the 3rd sequel but in my opinion, his performance here as the 2nd leading actor was way better since he really looks more of a ninja expert in this one compared to the third installmentHowever, there were a few minor complaints that I have for the film. First off, I expected Dudikoff and Bradley to team up together and become buddies like almost immediately in the film but sadly this did not happen for until like the final 20 minutes of the film. The final fights from both sides (Dudikoff's and Bradley's) were not really that entertaining either since Bradley only had to fight a chicken whuss and Dudikoff once again made an Arabic ninja (whose even more quite in the film than Michael was throughout the film) look like a kindergarden amateurAnother complaint that I would like to bring up (although minor) is that I think that it felt like pointless having the scene where Joe was making his weapons (the sword and shurikens) and holding up the sword in front of his face like it was the most important possession that he ever had but in the end, he just fought the enemies with his own bare hands and never used them at all throughout the ending of the film. I think that maybe the director had accidentally forgotten about that part which was why we never got to see Dudikoff using his weapons in the end. Another part that I have to complain was that they never really told the story of how Joe (Michael) and Sean (David) became friends in the first place and all in all, I felt like maybe this was more of like shrink and squeeze in as much as possible kind of plot story than the one that they had originally intended to createHowever, these flaws did not ruin the film too much since I felt it really did make up for the rather disappointing third sequel. All in all, I would really recommend this to all American Ninja fans out there and anyone else who just wants to spend three hours of their time watching some mindless but still a rather fun action movie