It’s out with Michael Dudikoff and in with David Bradley. After a rumored spat on set with Steve James and the director for “Blood Hunt,” David Bradley was brought on as the new American Ninja. His name is Sean Davidson and he’s not so much an American Ninja, as he is a kung fu fighter who fights ninjas a lot in “Blood Hunt.” Despite Bradley’s best efforts to steal the movie as the new charismatic hero, “Blood Hunt” is boring, confusing, and unnecessarily convoluted. I had such a hard time following the plot, and David Bradley doesn’t quite stack up to Dudikoff. Bradley’s character is a hodge podge of action clichés with a tragic back story that is never quite realized well in the film. He shambles through the movie getting in to battles with ninjas while Steve James returns doing his best to inject some fun in the movie.
David Bradley plays a young martial artist who watched his father, another martial artist, be shot dead during a horrific stand off during a martial arts tournament involving terrorists. He was then adopted by his dad’s sensei and trained to become a martial artist for most of his life. Years later Sean travels to an unnamed exotic country to enter in to a martial arts tournament. There he meets Curtis Jackson who is no longer a military man and is in the tournament for a sword competition. Along the way, Sean is inexplicably being confused with visions of his old sensei; he and his fellow martial arts bros also discover a secret organization working on a virus that will wipe out the population and help them control the world. Soon enough they begin hunting for The Cobra, a mysterious kingpin and madman who wants to use the virus and engineer it to cause immense destruction.
Of course when local authorities turn out to be in cahoots with them, it’s up to Sean, Curtis, their pal Dexter, and a mysterious Kunoichi named Chan Lee to put a stop to their plans. Basically its ninety minutes of the pals investigating, entering in to various locales and laying waste to any and all ninjas that try to eliminate them. Steve James reprises the role of Curtis Jackson but is sorely out of place, providing a charismatic and enthusiastic performance alongside Bradley who often seems to struggle to deliver his lines convincingly. It also doesn’t help a lot of the fights lack a distinct flair and pop that made the first two movies so much fun. Director Sam Firstenberger seemed to be trying to create iconic moments, while director Cedric Sundstrom seems to just be going through the motions.
There isn’t a single fight here that stands out and really gives us a reason to re-visit it again and again. It bears repeating that a lot of the movie’s plot makes no sense. It’s doubly annoying when writer Gary Conway resolves Sean’s painfully stupid central plot in such a cheap and abrupt manner. It feels like he either ran out of ideas, or was pressured to finish the script as soon as possible. Dull, lackluster, and forgettable, “Blood Hunt” is a low point for the film series and is worth watching mainly for Steve James.
Featured on the Blu-Ray from Olive Films is the original trailer for “American Ninja 3.” There’s the seven minute audition tape of the casting session with David Bradley. It’s VHS quality and clocks in at seven minutes. Finally, there’s “Strike Me Deadly: The Making of American Ninja 3” a fourteen minute featurette about the production of “American Ninja 3” filmed exclusively for Olive Films. There are clips of new interviews with Michael Dudikoff, director Cedric Sundstrom and EP Avi Lerner.