Review of Beverly Hills Ninja (1997) by Bradley W — 15 Jan 2012

Beverly Hills Ninja is a comedy that does not try to anything more than dumb. I love Chris Farley, I wish he were still alive today to make us laugh but he is not, and to be honest he is the only thing that is good about the film. Everything about the film is poorly done but even for the stupid stuff Chris Farley made funny. The way I saw this, it was one very long SNL skit that was funny but very boring.

The story follows Haru (Chris Farley) who has lived in a dojo and trained to be a ninja since infancy, but he is clumsy and lazy which has made him a poor ninja. When a woman asks for his help however, he must go to America to help her and complete his mission and prove himself a true ninja.

The plot is simple minded and dumb, but I expected nothing less from a Dennis Dugan comedy. Every moment I was not caring what was going on, all I cared about was getting a laugh, and I think its impossible not to laugh at Chris Farley. The characters are all really pointless but I think Farley was given a role that would have been pointless without him. Im pretty sure we all expected this not to be a very interesting comedy, and of course it turned out to be a movie that we would just laugh with Chris Farley.

The cast consists of Chris Farley and then a bunch of other people we simply do not care about. Chris Farley is one of my favorite old comedians, he is able to take pointless and stupid scripts like this and Tommy Boy and make them funny movies. Tommy Boy had a funny actor like David Spade however while they have Chris Rock in this and he does not do or say anything funny. If you are looking for a movie where Chris Farley will make you laugh this is it, but he is the only person who made me laugh and is the only interesting and funny cast member.

Beverly Hills Ninja is a movie that gets by on using Chris Farley as the main star. He would be one of the funniest comedians out there if he were still alive, possibly bigger than Adam Sandler. But this is not as good as Tommy Boy because of the cast, there were some seriously funny actors in Tommy Boy why this just uses Farley and nobody else. I wish I could have liked this but truthfully it just was not a good comedy unless you can watch a 90 minute movie of just laughing at Chris Farley.