My Cultural Diet

Shô Kosugi helped kick off America’s “ninjamania” craze in the early-to-mid ’80s via such Cannon Film classics as Enter the Ninja and Ninja III: The Domination. Rage of Honor falls into the same category, with Kosugi playing a DEA agent who goes rogue to track down his partner’s killer. Which means traveling to Argentina and putting his girlfriend in danger so he can kill a bunch of goons (and weirdly, some indigenous tribe members) with the help of his ninja skills (which mostly take the form of sweet-looking front flips), exploding shuriken, the tiniest nunchaku in movie history, and some eyeliner. Thankfully, the bad guys are incapable of hitting the broadside of a barn with a machine gun, giving Kosugi ample time to flip over them and dispatch them in all kinds of ways. Rage of Honor does its darndest to be gritty and hard-boiled (e.g., Stelvio Cipriani’s score), but it’s just a goofy film blessed with continuity errors, sloppy editing, and uneven action choreography. I’m a sucker for ’80s ninja fare, though, so I still enjoyed it for what it is.

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