It has been said that you are either a Chris Farley lover or a Chris Farley hater. Given the choice, I have to say that I am a hater. I wouldn't have put it so harshly, but I am led to believe that those were the options.
The reason I don't loathe Chris Farley so much after seeing this film is that the movie in itself is to terrible, Chris Farley blends right in and is just as terrible as everything else in this idiotic flick. For fellow Farley-haters, this is something of an achievement.
Let me run you through it. A white baby boy is washed up on a secluded coast of Japan, sealed in an water-and-airtight chest. Of course, the baby is in fine shape and not completely asphyxia-blue, as you may have expected. But, as the movie will show us, with Chris Farley around, no natural laws are certain.
Anyway, the finders, who are your average ninjas, think this boy to be the Great White Ninja, and train him like that. Of course, the boy grows up to be Chris Farley, which is a very different thing.
So we have established a very bad ninja, who falls down a lot, breaks or burns a lot of valuable stuff, and is generally incompetent. So when a beautiful young girl called Allison from Beverly Hills just happens to wander by the ninja's remote secret training grounds, who better to ask for help than Chris Farley, oh sorry, Haru. That's his name in the movie, but I could have sworn he was just Chris Farley in a jumpsuit. To totally convince the girl of his competence he trashes the joint by accident, but this doesn't bother her. In Chris Farley-Land, the mishaps of Chris Farley are invisible.
So, Haru finds out quickly that Allison's husband is a counterfeiter and a big-time crook. He finds out about this, because the husband drops little hints like saying 'I am a crook'. In fact, all the characters have the convenient habit of describing themselves and their actions at convenient times. This is the hallmark of fine screenwriting. But I digress.
Haru decides to try and find Allison in Beverly Hills. He takes a plane and sets off the metal detector. He courteously removes all his metal weapons, including two huge swords. Do the security guards cuff him immediately for trying to compromise airline security? Nope. Do they take the weapons from him? Nope, he still has the swords in the next scene, in America! What they do is just look at each other, probably thinking "why are we in this stupid movie?"
In America, Haru gets in a car. He makes it obvious in his own, subtle little Farleyesque way that he has never seen a car before. Then he proceeds to drive away in it. 10 IQ points to anyone who can spot the error here.
Another 10 IQ points is awarded to the person who can see, that Haru speaking american in a Hollywood accent from the very first scene is a little odd for a kid raised in Japan by ninjas, who at least speak american with appropriate comedy japanese accents.
Tally up 10 IQ points for each of these you can see:
- Chris Rock plays a character, who works in a swanky, 5-star hotel, yet lives in the grubbiest ghetto you can imagine.
- The real ninja, Gobei, knows what Allison looks like, despite never having seen her before.
- Paying customers to an all-girl strip joint cheer and clap, when Haru blunders onto the catwalk and begins to take all his clothes off (as part of his 'walk-in-the-shadows' strategy)
- Haru's reaction to placing his nose on an incredibly hot frying surface in a restaurant is to keep his nose on the surface, smoking and sizzling away, while saying 'aaahh-wooooo-aaaaah'. In a related incident, a boiling hot greasy shrimp is flicked straight from the cooking surface in between a young girl's breasts. Her reaction to the immense pain of a grease-burn on sensitive skin is saying 'ooh' coyly.
- The cover operation of the bank note counterfieting business is called 'Beverly Hills Bank Note'
- After Haru exposes the entire racket and knows all the crooks' secrets, they capture him. Once he escapes, the bag guys find out, but they don't care that he's gone free.
- Horses overtake a sports car, presumably going as fast as it can.
If you have 90 IQ points, then, well, you have more points than the producers of this stink-bomb of a movie. Everyone and everything is stupid. The characters are flat and pointless, and so is the abundant, obligatory Farley slapstick.
I know it's supposed to be a silly movie, but the writing is just so terrible it could be on Mystery Science Theater. There are good zany comedies out there, a few of the Zuckerman movies spring to mind. They have stupid situations too, but they are on some plane believable.
Oh, sorry I said 'plane'. The Collective Consciousness Plane in this movie takes the cake for being the stupidest sequences in the movie. Well, it would have taken the cake, had Chris Farley not eaten it.
