THREE NINJAS KNUCKLE UP

In THREE NINJAS KNUCKLE UP, three pre-teenage American boys visit their grandfather for the summer. Their grandfather has trained them to be ninjas. This training comes in handy when some bad guys dump deadly chemicals into a landfill located beside an Indian reservation. The boys fight the bad guys, using their ninja moves kicking, flipping, punching, jumping, and hitting, as they try to retrieve a computer disk containing a list of the deadly chemicals being dumped into the landfill. The bad guys are finally taken to court and shut down because of the proof of the deadly chemicals located by the boys.

THREE NINJAS KNUCKLE UP is a very predictable movie: bad guys enter, good guys beat them up. However, no one gets severely hurt in the cartoon-like fighting. The moral of the story is humility, and the young boys learn they should not use their ninja talents to attract attention to themselves. They learn to be as “quiet as a flower.” While this is a good message, though presented as Oriental metaphysics, the violence that the young boys exercise overrides the good theme. In THREE NINJAS KNUCKLE UP, children will be exposed to yet another movie that solves problems with violence. Although being a ninja fighter is very different from the everyday gang violence, it is still in no way a model our children should emulate.