3 Ninjas

Well, it looks like you children are back in school for another year. To add on to your misery, this month I will review another franchise that ripped-off Ninja Turtles. I’m of course talking about the “3 Ninjas” franchise. For those of you who grew up watching “3 Ninjas,” you might have liked it as children, but now, looking back, you probably don’t remember it fondly. To prove that, I will review the first “3 Ninjas” movie, released in 1992.

If you were one of those kids that either begged your parents or you were allowed to watch violent movies like “The Karate Kid,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” or “Home Alone,” save yourself from the misery of “3 Ninjas.”

However, if you only saw those movies as harmless, cartoony enjoyment, then consider “3 Ninjas” in the same ballpark. Actually, think of it as a clone.

The story, which Chris Hicks described as “little more than an outline for three big set pieces,” shows three brothers (Michael Treanor, Max Elliott Slade, and Chad Power) learning karate from their aging but very agile grandfather, Mori Shintaro (Victor Wong).

There’s a subplot in this movie that shows the typical workaholic dad, FBI agent Sam Douglas, played by Alan McRae, who makes his kids learn martial arts while he basically ignores his family. Want to guess what the moral will be at the end of the movie? Also, the boys bump into your typical school bullies, played by Baha Jackson and Scott Caudill.

Most of the film focuses on this evil gunrunner named Snyder, played by Rand Kingsley, whose evil plan is to kidnap our three main heroes so that their father will leave him alone. On top of that, Snyder was taught in his youth by Shintaro.

Like all movies, the first fight sequence is the opening, which shows the three brothers being trained by their grandfather and end up meeting Snyder and his henchmen for the first time. The second arrives when three goofballs (D.J. Harder, Race Nelson and Patrick Labyorteaux), as described by Hicks as “talk in Waynespeak (as in "Wayne's World"),” attempt to kidnap the boys while they are sleeping but failed because the brothers set up this film’s version of the “Home Alone” traps. The third is the final fight on the docked freighter, which is a one-on-one battle between Shintaro and Snyder.

All of these three fight sequences are subjected to cartoon sound effects and lots of comedic variations on how to fight people, to make them light-hearted, which Hicks described it “resembles a Tom and Jerry cartoon.”

Hicks said in his review, “For me, "3 Ninjas" had its amusing moments but was also tedious at times. For the kids who surrounded me it was terrific — they laughed, hooted and cheered the three young heroes, with whom they obviously identified.”

Here’s something that you will be asking yourself when watching this movie: How come Shintaro is Asian and no one else has at least one Asian trait? Also, he’s their mother’s father, and the mother, played by Margarita Franco, isn’t Asian. Hicks asked, “Was it really necessary to cast Mom and the kids as WASPs?”

This film contains bloodless violence (well it should since this is a kids movie), some disturbing moments like when a gun is put to a kid’s head, some soft bad manners, such as the expected low blow kicks and a scene where one of the kidnappers drinks laxative and gets diarrhea, which isn’t anywhere as funny as it was in “Dumb and Dumber.”

Overall, avoid this film. The director, Jon Turteltaub, luckily got out of directing the other sequels, but the rest of the people who worked on it didn’t. This film is the reason why you should never combine “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Home Alone,” it doesn’t work. However, like I had mentioned, they didn’t stop here, so look out next week when I look at the first sequel in the franchise for “3 Ninjas Month.”