American Ninja 4: The Annihilation (1991, directed by Cedric Sundstrom)

The new American Ninja, Sean Davidson (David Bradley), travels to a remote island nation and gets captured while investigating a corrupt British ninja named Colonel Mulgrew (James Booth), who is trying to help an evil sheikh (Ron Smerczac) purchase a suitcase nuke. With Sean and his associates being held hostage in an old British fort, the original American Ninja, Joe Armstrong (Michael Dudikoff), is called in to rescue Sean and thwart the terrorist’s plot. Joe has retired from the Ninja game and is now work as a member of the Peace Corps but he’s persuaded to battle evil one last time. In typical Cannon Films fashion, he has an army of rebels backing him up as he attacks Mulgrew’s compound.

The fourth American Ninja film teams up Michael Dudikoff with the David Bradley, who took over the American Ninja franchise with the third film. The idea was probably to use the presence of Dudikoff to give Bradley the credibility that he lacked in his previous American Ninja outing but the film actually sabotages David Bradley further by having Bradley spend nearly the entire film tied up while Dudikoff gets to fight the bad guys. Dudikoff and Bradley barely even interact in the film, with Bradley mostly being present for the slowly-paced opening while Dudikoff shows up for the more exciting, fight-filled finale. It’s almost as if the film was set up as an elaborate prank to make Sean look even less worthy as a replacement as Joe. While it’s true that Sean does get to fight Mulgrew at the end of the movie, Joe gets to fights the Super Ninja (Kely McClung). Fighting a Super Ninja is always going to be more impressive than fighting a British guy.

American Ninja 4 is a Cannon film but it was definitely not made during Cannon’s heyday and it is never as memorable as any of the previous American Ninja films. The poster features Dudikoff and Bradley both ready to battle, much like those old issues of Marvel Team-Up that would feature both Spider-Man and the Human Torch working together to battle Doctor Doom, Doctor Octopus, or any of the other evil comic book doctors. (Marvel had a lot of them.) Bringing the two American Ninjas together would seem to promise double the action but instead, it’s just an underwhelming team-up. Cannon would have been better served by adapting the issue of Marvel Team-Up where Spider-Man and John Belushi battled the Silver Samurai. That was an exciting story!