#16 - 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain

This movie, as you may have guessed, does not actually feature a mountain. It takes place in a theme park, which is a decent enough place for teenagers to get into some great scrapes. Here, a group of criminals and/or terrorists have decided to stage an enormous hostage crisis, demanding ten million dollars in exchange for the safety of the parkgoers -- not from the relatives of the people trapped inside, or from the government, but from the park's owner, who is successfully threatened by the prospect of dozens of whiplash lawsuits. The criminal team includes Loni Anderson, resplendent in pleather and ugly earrings, and a truly unfortunate Jim Varney, who looks remarkably like John Waters. Also on this strike force: Several incompetent goons, most of whom get kicked square in the balls by six year-olds, a pack of riflemen, all of whom are talented enough to fire into a panicked throng and avoid hitting a single person, and approximately seven hundred ninjas, who are instructed to wait in the park's basement until the last fifteen minutes of the film.

The 3 Ninjas, incidentally, are all brothers, although I suspect the middle brother, who somehow manages both an underbite and an overbite, is adopted. The oldest of the three has a girlfriend, who will later be tied to a set of rollercoaster tracks, and who later still will star in "Caitlin's Way," a show on Nickelodeon which I appear to have been alone in watching. The youngest brother, judging by how much candy he eats in the first five minutes of the movie, and how little candy he eats thereafter, has convinced himself that he is hypoglycemic. The middle brother doesn't really do anything. The middle brother, in all honesty, really doesn't have a lot going for him.

Never having watched any of the previous films in the series, I find myself left with a lot of questions: How is it possible for these ninjas to have a wizened Asian grandfather when the film is nearly exclusively filled with upper-middle class Caucasians?¹ Do special-effects engineers really come home with satchels of throwing stars shaped like playing cards, which can then be packaged in Tupperware and gifted to one's daughter? Who let the middle ninja have such a terrible haircut? Is there really a party in the back of his head -- and a party in the front?



(See what I said before about this guy? The poor bastard!)

But all of these questions are secondary to this one: Would any self-respecting ninth-grader actually be so afraid of being yelled at by a guy with a neckbeard that he'd actually piss his pants?



Anyway -- here's what I really want to talk about. There's a beautiful moment in the middle of this film where three things happen, one directly after the other. A roller coaster is frozen mid-loop, revealing some truly great half-assed terror from the five extras aboard; a bafflingly choppy rack zoom closes in on the shy sidekick's face; Hulk Hogan gibbers in terror. It's an unintentional nadir, but it neatly divides the movie into two parts, the former of which deals with exposition (although nothing relating to the previous movies, including who any of the characters are, or why they look nothing like the previous sets of 3 Ninjas), and the latter of which is insufferable and packed with call-backs to the former. Here, let me show you this moment:





After this moment, the suspension of disbelief drops out as the screenplay attempts to give the terrorists (or whatever) a reason to focus on the 3 Ninjas rather than the police and FBI, who have surrounded the park and have guns (but not helicopters, apparently) -- and still afterwards, the 3 Ninjas force themselves to care about their boring grandfather and the unity of brotherhood². Some might say that this is the earmark to a cheap cash-in sequel, but I'd like to believe that somewhere, somehow, the director saw those three shots in sequence and realized he wasn't going to top himself, and so just stopped showing up. I wouldn't blame the guy.

(One last thing: Here's what the rollercoaster scene probably looked like when they were filming it, before they flipped it upside-down. Look at the guy on the left! He's having so much fun!)

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¹ Exceptions: The excruciatingly Jamaican hacker; the oldest ninja's girlfriend's best friend, who appears to be around exclusively to say "Giiiirl" a lot.

² Also, the film implies that if you can manage to do this, you will spontaneously learn echolocation. That was new information to me.