3 Ninjas

Despite the obvious rip-offs of other films, the cartoony, slapstick humor does generate enough charm to pull chuckles from a young audience. But too much of the action - the sword-fighting and basketball stunt scenes, especially - looks distractingly fake. [08 Aug 1992, p.26]

While one could wish the film offered something more original than its strictly formula heroics, it benefits from a generous portion of charm. And most kids attending 3 Ninjas are likely to stand up and cheer the rousing, action-packed finale.

The fight sequences are well handled, the three leads are pleasant (and quite good, it seems, at the martial arts) and the violence is bloodless and amusing, with all kinds of cartoon sound effects thrown in to soften the chop-socky violence. If the audience at a sold-out Saturday afternoon showing I attended is any indication, 3 Ninjas delivers the promised action-packed, empty-headed goods. As long as your age is still in the single digits, that is. [10 Aug 1992, p.C6]

The film can't seem to make up its mind whether it wants to be a comedy, a fantasy or an adventure film. Mr. Kingsley's villain gnashes his teeth and snorts, I love being the bad guy. Those who displease him are threatened with the tearing out of a heart or liver. The character ends up being neither scary nor funny, while the boys are so busy demonstrating their superhuman skills that no personalities emerge.

If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, then 3 Ninjas is a lovers' rhapsody. If duplication is theft, then Disney is guilty of grand larceny. [07 Aug 1992, p.8]

3 Ninjas, Touchstone Pictures' latest attempt to fill the idle summer hours of our nation's youth, is a Frankenstein of a movie, an unhappy creature stitched together out of the body parts of other movies. And though it's not a horror film, it is a genuinely scary experience, if only because it actually seems to make time stand dead still.

A miserable ripoff of The Karate Kid with three whitebread young-uns taking lessons from their Chinese grandfather on how to be upright and horizontal ninja warriors. They get their kicks trying to knock off a Steven Seagal imitation who is running drugs.