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 Sho Kosugi is a narcotics cop whose partner gets murdered causing Sho to seek revenge. Tracking the killer to Buenos Aires, he ends up going into the jungle to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend. 1986, 92 minutes, DVD
Was there really a time when Sho Kosugi got his name above the title of a movie the same way an Elizabeth Taylor or a Jean-Claude Van Damme did? After having watched the charisma-impaired Sho grimace his way through this and Revenge Of The Ninja , I can only assume that they let him in these movies because he brought all his own ninja weapons. It surely wasn't for his looks which can be best described as continuously dyspeptic. It wasn't for his ability to communicate in the English language which had me thinking on more than one occasion that perhaps he was suffering from sort of dysphasia and the casting of him was the result of some mid-eighties affirmative action program designed to help martial artists with speech impediments. Perhaps it was the romantic sparks that flew between him and the used-up looking blondes he was usually paired with. I mean, we had that one really gross kiss on the lips between them that lasted about two seconds (two seconds longer than his female co-star desired, I'll wager). Maybe it was just his ability to bring his own ninja stuff. Yeah, having your own gear always helps.
It's been four years since Revenge Of The Ninja . In the meantime, Sho had picked up paychecks in a variety of projects, inevitably containing the word "ninja" in the title. There was Ninja III: The Domination, Nine Deaths Of The Ninja, and a series of TV movies called Master Ninja culled from his hit thirteen episode run on the TV show, The Master (also starring Lee Van Cleef and Salami from The White Shadow). The one without "ninja" in the title was Pray For Death, but it had that neat oversized video box that we all remember. Plus the title was pretty cool, though I can't understand why they didn't go with The Ninja Prays For Death or the more spaghetti western flavored, Pray For Death, Ninja! (and yes, the exclamation mark is necessary). But it didn't matter what these things were called because Sho was always hip deep in ninja.
But sadly, there comes a time in a man's life and in his career when you have to grow up a little bit and move on from where you came from in an effort to find a more fulfilling kind of success. In acting, this means that guys known for drama want to do comedy (Robert DeNiro in those painful Billy Crystal films) and guys who are America's favorite funnymen want to do drama (Tom Hanks in all those overblown dramas about spaceships and deserted islands, Adam Sandler in the noxious Punchdrunk Love, and Jim Carrey in movies nobody has ever seen like The Majestic or The Truman Show). And guys known for being a ninja want to be drug enforcement agents.
Before any of you start cackling at the prospect of Sho whipping out his nunchucks at DEA meetings, you need to know that even though he is a drug cop, he isn't working for the DEA. His employer is the U.S. Drug Investigation Bureau or the USDIB. USDIB is apparently a super secret organization dedicated to fighting the drug war in Argentina when they aren't operating out of their home base on the mean streets of Phoenix. Argentina? Phoenix? Either someone didn't have any idea of what constituted good drama in a movie about a drug lord or they had buddies in Argentina that could get them cheap hotel rates. (Who cares if Phoenix is overrun by druggies? That city's built on land where the water table can't support a Gila monster let alone a city of 1.3 million people.) At least Steven Seagal had the good sense to fight Colombians, Jamaicans, and Italians in real cities during his early nineties war on drugs.
Sho and his USDIB buddies are down in Buenos Aires and they crash a party aboard a yacht where some kind of drug stuff is going on (I usually zone out whenever people start going on about shipments and organizations and cartels and stuff - I saw every episode of Miami Vice three times so I'm pretty much played out on these foreign drug pusher evil crime lord with long hair plots.). Sho and company fight a bunch of goons and it involves Sho kicking a lot of people and shoving a gun in a guy's butt (the movie's only memorable contribution to the action drug film genre or the Sho film canon). Even more offensive to this viewer was that Sho was engaging in all this action in a rather effeminate white windbreaker! The teal T-shirt he had underneath wasn't helping matter either and made me nostalgic for a more manly time when Sho wore eyeliner while dressed in a ninja costume as he did in Revenge Of The Ninja.
The movie does have good intentions though, as evidenced by Sho's run in with his boss after the shakedown on the yacht. He's the kind of flabby, uptight boss who bellows at Sho about following rules and procedures and going through channels. Sho and his partners let this bureaucratic sissy know that while he's three hole punching his secretary in his cozy office, they're out working the street and that when you're out working the street you ain't got time for procedures! Why, if they had stopped to fill out all the paperwork before hitting that yacht, do you think that Sho would've be able to get involved in that speedboat chase? Or blown up the bad guy's speedboat? Or used his gun as an anal probe? Well, maybe a little paperwork wouldn't be all bad.
Back in Phoenix, Sho has taken the night off (causing the anuses of bad guys everywhere to pucker a little less) and is all decked out in a tuxedo (complete with scarf!) to take his gal out for a fancy dinner. Watching the interaction between a guy who can't speak a word of English and doesn't even the acting ability to pretend he cares about any scene where he isn't doing flips in the air and kicking guys in the head and a girl whose last acting credit would be this very film made me wish we were out working the streets again, holding dirtbags' butts at gunpoint.
Luckily, one of Sho's partners is working a hot tip all by himself about some nefarious goings on at a warehouse. He leaves a message for Sho before going in and getting himself tortured to death (it all happens offscreen so don't get too excited) but not before croaking out some vital bit of information to Sho who has cut his evening short to meet him there (you could practically see Sho breathing a sigh of relief when he finally gets to leave the restaurant. His old lady was also breathing a sigh of relief when all she got from him before he left was a peck on the cheek.). I think Sho got a name from this guy as he cashed his last USDIB paycheck, but it doesn't matter because the bad guy torches the whole place and thinks he's eliminated USDIB's top agents!
As would later be explained to Sho's girlfriend, Sho was raised on the home islands in Japan and his sense of honor is everything. There isn't anything he wouldn't do to avenge somebody's honor which is good to know, because I was worried that with Sho's best friend being dead and Sho himself almost toasted, that he might ask USDIB to give him a desk job until the heat on him cooled down. Sho informs his boss that he's going back to Argentina to track down the guy that did his partner. His boss tells him that that's against the rules (Dammit Sho! It's in the handbook! The deaths of any partner must go unavenged!) and to take a vacation. Well, Sho may have been raised on some island somewhere, but even he knows when it's time to slap that badge down in disgust and walk out to start a one man war!
Sho, though, doesn't know all the finer points about starting a one man war of revenge on an army of hundreds of drug runners because he takes his stupid girlfriend down to Argentina with him under the guise of a vacation! Maybe he figures that once she gets kidnapped, that'll give him some extra incentive to kill even more people than if he was just avenging a single co-worker. It works pretty well for him since it isn't long before some thug is trying to throw her off the balcony of their hotel room. Later on, a plane she's on gets hijacked and Sho has to go off into the jungle to rescue her. So she was good for two different rescues which really isn't a bad job by the girlfriend (at least if she's not going to go and get herself out and out killed, thus providing some serious avenging material).
Sho spends the rest of the movie running around from battle to battle. He fights guys in a warehouse. He fights some ninja that invade the Argentine prison Sho gets himself locked up in. He fights a tribe of cannibals in the jungle (I don't know if they were cannibals for sure, but if it's one thing the Italians have taught me, it's that South America is pretty much crawling with these freaks.), dodging blow gun attacks and stabbing them with his samurai sword. Then he has to fight a group of guys with flame throwers and some dudes with pikes. Pikes? What happened to assault weapons? Or Napalm? He has not one, but two big battles with the head bad guy. One of them is in a river and involves some slow motion and highly exaggerated sound effects so that it seems as if God and the Devil themselves are clashing with the fate of the very world at stake. But nothing gets settled as the bad guy ends up falling over a waterfall or something and doesn't turn up until the final fight at the old abandoned factory.
This movie does have lots of action in the sense that there's lots of scenes where guys get blown up, shot, stabbed, fall off of stuff, and stuck with throwing stars. But it's done without any style and becomes repetitive with the faceless numbers that continuously are thrown up against Sho. None of the violence has any impact on you because it's so omnipresent and is just like what you'd see in any generic actioner of the era. Sho seems to have a limitless supply of weapons, whipping out smoke bombs, shurikens, swords, and crossbows at will.
Despite the fact that Sho doesn't really do that much different in this one than he did in Revenge Of The Ninja , this time it's worse because there wasn't any of the silly crap in this movie that went on the other one. There wasn't any over-the-top villain with a silver mask who tried to kill women in hot tubs and kids in saunas. There wasn't any ridiculous fight scenes like the on in the city park against the Village People. No grandma going toe to toe with the bad guy. Even Kane Kosugi was smart enough not to enlist in this one. Without all that to distract us, Sho's shortcomings as far as screen presence go as well as the cookie-cutter plot and action sequences are only magnified. The only way you should ever watch this is with a gun shoved up your butt.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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