I’ve just been swamping myself with mediocrity since we started here. Nothing jaw-droppingly awesome (but I’ve got some stuff lined up…), and nothing astonishingly, flesh-meltingly bad (I’ve also got some stuff lined up…). Just not-bad-enough-to-be-interesting generic crap. I was thinking about changing my tagline (had I a tagline to begin with) to something like, “Sitting through boring, mediocre shit so I can save you the trouble.”
Today’s movie is another chip off the old “they didn’t try or fail hard enough” block. Pat Morita plays Dr. Oh, a crazy scientist working for Nova Corp. Seems he escaped with his pet project, Takeru, who is a genetically-altered, unfailingly obedient killer ninja clone. Oh, and clones are outlawed, by the way. They make a great show of that in the opening title card, but it never comes up again. Just gotta make sure you know it’s…THE FUTURE! I guess.
Dr. Oh has been sending Takeru to kill off his Nova colleagues, afraid that they’ll steal his secret DNA recipe, the Obedience Strain. Understandably afraid, the rest of the Nova scientists contract boozed-up bounty hunter extraordinaire Mitchell (!) Madison to take Takeru down. In their first meeting, Mitchell (!) meets Dr. Oh, but the battle results in the lab exploding and all but Mitchell (!) and Takeru being killed. Which is really too bad, because Morita was a fantastic mad scientist in the whole three minutes of screen time he got. Great, only fifteen minutes in and we lose the only character I have any interest in. I see this taking a rapid downhill slide.
So now we have not only the “generic drunken doesn’t-play-by-the-rules bounty hunter” plotline, but the “I must avenge my kung-fu master” plotline. And Mitchell (!) has his own reason for wanting to take down Takeru, because his alcoholism has destroyed his liver and he wants Takeru’s super-duper ninja clone liver, to kung-fu the alcohol out of his system, I guess.
Takeru meets yet another cardboard cutout of a character, the Hooker With the Heart Of Gold. We’ll refer to her as HOG from now on. Except there’s not much more to say about her, aside from the fact that she shows Takeru that he can have a human side after all, until she dies.
While Takeru is hunting scientists and Mitchell (!) is hunting Takeru, Dr. “What, You Didn’t Realize I Was Really the Bad Guy?” Hilliard is developing his own super-ninja clone from a sample of Takeru’s blood. His growth is rapidly accelerated, so we get to see several stages of hyperactive kung-fu Superkenny killing grown musclemen before Hilliard’s clone matures. And when he does, I couldn’t help but think, "Gee, that’s funny, for being cloned from a Japanese, Superkenny looks startlingly like a bald white guy, specifically former UFC heavyweight champ Bas Rutten". And before you ask, yes, my inner monologue always rambles that much. Hell, my outer monologue usually rambles that much.
Anyway, Takeru is about to kill the last of the Nova scientists that Mitchell (!) has completely failed to protect, but HOG intervenes and winds up skewered on Takeru’s katana, making him feel real human emotions for the first time and I am a real boy!
Which brings us to the final showdown at Hilliard’s lab. While Takeru takes on Superkenny, Mitchell (!) faces down a bunch of Hilliard’s previous failed experiments. And in case you were wondering, the byproducts of trying to create killer ninja clones are a bunch of goateed guys with blotchy faces and the least convincing wigs this side of Robo Vampire.
Will Takeru defeat Superkenny? Will Mitchell (!) finally get his new liver so he can drink twice as much? Will Dr. Hilliard be made to pay for putting those stupid wigs on his clones? Just watch the action-packed conclusion of Shadow Fury to find out. Or don’t. You’re not really missing anything that hasn’t been done better.
Now, I’d like to address a couple of things. First, what is it about these third-tier, “drop some clichéd plotlines in the Gener-O-Matic and watch the crap come out the other end” movies that keeps letting them be made? Surely they can’t make that much money. And this one wasn’t even a DIY digital video thing, it was a real movie. It probably cost more to produce and put on the shelves than it will ever make in a million years in rentals, and it sure as shit never found its way to a theater. So how, with the market as over-saturated as it already is with this crap, can these things still keep popping up at the rate of ten or twelve every goddamn week and make even the barest glimmerings of a profit? Somehow, I get the feeling Golan and Globus had something to do with it. And in conjunction with that, Mitchell (!) kept having flashbacks, because the reason he’s a useless drunk is because he uses booze to drown his bad war memories. He led a platoon, they all died, he blames himself. When a writer sits down to peg out his characters, does he really think, “I know, I’ll make the bounty hunter a pathetic drunkard who’s haunted by memories of his war-torn past. People will love that. They’ll connect with him. Everyone has an uncle like that. What a great, sympathetic character I’ve created!” Because if so, I want all you burgeoning writers who have an idea like that to stand in line and put all your heads together so I only have to waste one bullet on the lot of you.
The Moral of the Story: White guys doing kung-fu. It’s stupid. I don’t care how much muscle you have, how many pairs of sunglasses you wear, how bald you are, or how long your trench coat is, you still look like a jackass. Even at their most neck-cords-bulging-eyeballs-popping screaming moments, Asian kung-fu masters have a grace and dignity about them that big, musclebound white dudes will never be able to duplicate. Now I know what you’re thinking, I know this is some kind of vaguely complimentary reverse-racism stereotyping, but dammit, it’s a plain fact. Maybe it’s in the attitude. A true kung-fu master learns martial arts for strength of body and peace of mind, while American tourney fighters just learn it because they think it makes them look tough and cool. But it makes you look like a giant, bipedal douche. So knock it the fuck off. You’re not impressing anyone.
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