It was this process that led me to today’s movie, the 1992
martial arts offering American Samurai.
It’s directed by the ever-prolific Sam
Firstenberg, who also gifted the world of cinema with the American Ninja and Cyborg Cop
franchises and directed the
celebrated opus Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. The titular American
samurai is played by martial artist David Bradley, whose other credits include
three of the American Ninja movies
(though weirdly not the ones directed by Firstenber) and an episode of Murder, She Wrote. A bit of disclosure here: I'm reviewing the 2005 Warner Bros. DVD release of the film, which is cropped like crazy to the point that it's functionally edited for violence despite carrying an R rating.
The setup of the movie is as simple as it is nonsensical: A
private plane carrying a rich family crashes in the mountains of Japan. Everyone on board is killed except for baby
Drew, who is found and rescued by Tatsuya Sanga, modern Japanese swordsman and
easy-going guy. Rather than, say,
contacting the proper authorities and reconnecting the boy with his surviving
family overseas, Sanga adopts Drew as his own and trains him to be a samurai
warrior. Drew progresses quickly with
the help of a training montage and eventually surpasses Sanga’s own son Kenjiro
in skill. Kenjiro is bitterly envious of
Drew, and when their father passes on the family katana to Drew instead of him,
Kenjiro vows revenge.
Several years later we find Drew living in the United States
as a reporter, while the sinister Kenjiro has gone on to become
the Chairman of Iron Chef America a dangerous
yakuza assassin.* Kenjiro sends goons to Drew’s apartment to steal back the
family sword. Drew beats up several
members of the gang but is eventually shot, losing the sword and punishing
viewers with an extended, weirdly shot dream sequence. After finding his samurai will to survive in
dreamland, Drew sticks his fingers into his own abdomen and pulls out the
bullet, after which he is somehow just fine.
Because the presence of the slug itself is what’s harmful about being
shot, apparently.
Shortly thereafter, we find Drew back on his feet and on his
way to Turkey to investigate a murder related to the drug trade. (This is the one and only time it is ever
salient to the plot that he’s a reporter.)
Drew is convinced that only Kenjiro could have committed the murder, as
the victim was apparently killed with special technique known only to the Sanga
line of swordsmen. Alongside Drew is
photographer Janet Ward, with whom he bickers unconvincingly for ten minutes of
screen time before they shag in the least titillating love scene ever filmed
this side of National Geographic. In all
honesty, if you like boobless, buttless sex scenes using obvious body doubles,
dubbed voices, and creepy art-house lighting, American Samurai is your kink.
It may also be worth noting that this pallid humping comes immediately after Drew has a waking
nightmare and Janet finds him swinging a sword in an empty hotel room while wearing
nothing but tiny red man-panties.
The two eventually follow Kenjiro’s trail to a nightclub
connected to a known drug trafficker.
While subtly looking for clues about Kenjiro by directly asking every
shady-looking guy in the bar if they known his brother by name, Drew finds
himself drawn into a bar brawl between the local talent and a big beardy guy
dressed as a cowboy. Drew is shot with a
taser during the struggle and he and Janet are captured by the bad guys. Drew awakens chained up in an old-timey
dungeon, with Kenjiro waiting to inform him that Janet will be killed if Drew
doesn’t take part in a Tukish swordfighting tournament filled with pirates and
guys dressed like Conan the Barbarian.
At this point I feel like I should point out that I’m not
skimming over the plot in this review, it’s just that this movie has all the
coherence and structure of a fever dream.
I don’t know for sure if the final product represents the film as it was
originally intended or if a bunch of plot elements somehow ended up on the
cutting room floor, but American Samurai
is not overly concerned with forming an intricate narrative. Or any narrative. Instead, it wants desperately to get to the
fight scenes as fast as possible – Which is fair enough, because they’re the
only good parts.
Drew reluctantly agrees to fight in the tournament, which is
apparently being held so that the super rich can bet on mortal combat. There’s a million dollar prize up for grabs
to the winner, but the price of defeat is death or dismemberment. A video game roster of costumed combatants
has shown up, including the aforementioned barbarian and pirate, some kung fu
guys, a Viking, and (shock of shocks),
the bowie-knife wielding cowboy from the bar.
The cowboy introduces himself as Ed Harrison, a down-on-his-luck guy who
views the tournament as his last shot at the good life. He and Drew share a long moment as they both
realize that Ed is going to fill the “good guy’s pal who gets killed by the bad
guy” role in this picture.
I actually don’t want to say too much about the fight
scenes, as they’re really what the movie exists for. The viewer gets to see pretty much all of the
tournament fights and many of them are pretty interesting, although honestly
the ones without the main characters are arguably the best. There’s a fight between a couple of kung
fu-ish guys that’s quite a bit of fun,
as well as a battle between the oft-mentioned Conan clone and a guy dressed
like an American gladiator that scratches the itch pretty well too.
Drew’s fights are odd because, since he’s the good guy, he
doesn’t want to kill anybody. This means
he’s doing a whole of ninja-kicking bad guys while they’re trying to run him
through with halberds and whatnot. In
one fight he turns his sword around and fights with the spine of the blade
(kind of like that old samurai anime Rurouni
Kenshin), which is pretty cool, but I wish we got to see more swordplay out
of him. He also constantly gets ghostly,
Obi-wan Kenobi advice from the disembodied voice of his dad. Well, not really advice, just his dad’s voice
constantly telling how bad-ass samurai are, but I think we’re meant to take it
as advice.
The tournament sequence, which takes up around 60% of the
movie, is for some reason divided up into days that the viewer is made aware of
through subtitles at the bottom of the screen.
I guess this is meant to give us some sense of verisimilitude – Nobody would
physically be able to handle half a dozen death duels in one day while still
putting on a show for the crowd – but since the editing is so bad that you can
see guys who got disemboweled earlier in tournament walking around in the locker
room later it all becomes kind of a moot point.
At the end, of course, Kenjiro and Drew must duel to the death. Again, it’s hard to escape the video game
vibe here. Both guys are dressed in
opposite color outfits like Ryu and Ken from Streefighter and, dun-dun-dun, Kenjiro is evilly using the sacred
family sword against his own brother.
Before they begin, Kenjiro announces that once he’s killed Drew, he’s
going to go back to Japan and kill their dad too. Since the dad had only appeared as a magic
ghost voice since ten minutes into the movie, I’d assumed he was dead
already. Silly me.
Unfortunately, the climatic battle is probably the worst
fight scene in the movie. A number of
sequences consist of one combatant flailing away at a disembodied sword blade
poking in from off-screen, and in general it’s just shot so badly that it’s
hard to tell what’s going on. There’s
even some cropped stock footage from a previous fight. In the end Drew pacifist spares his brother’s
life by hacking gigantic gashes out of both of his ankles and leaving him to
wallow in a pool of his own blood. Drew
reclaims the family sword, then magnanimously gives Kenjiro his own katana so
that the wicked brother can commit seppuku and reclaim his samurai honor. Of course, once Drew has his back turned
Kenjiro gets other ideas. Once Drew is
approximately 15 yards away, Kenjiro lawn-darts a full-sized katana at him with
an angry villain yell, only have Drew knocked it back at him (from 15 yards
away, I must repeat) such that it impales him perfectly through the center of
the chest.
The end.
What can I say about American
Samurai? It’s bad. I remember being extremely impressed with
this movie when I saw it on cable as a 12 year-old, but it just doesn’t hold up
well at all. If I’m honest, I also had
it mixed up pretty badly in my mind with Circle
of Steel, a 1994 movie with more or less the same plot. I couldn’t in good conscience recommend it to
anyone, but for the curious, there’s an edited version of it on Youtube that only has the fight scenes. I still wouldn’t recommend it, but what you
do when I’m not looking is your business.
____________
* But seriously, that
actor went on to become the Chairman of Iron Chef America.
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