Writers: AAV Creative Unit (story), Godfrey Ho (screenplay)
One thing you might be wondering is who the hell is this "AAV Creative Unit" guy that supposedly wrote the, ahem, "story" for this film. Was it a (very) young Ron Artest or perhaps some previously unknown daughter of Frank Zappa? Who knows. What's more important is that the director is the infamous Godfrey Ho, the Orson Welles (or was it Ed Wood?) of Hong Kong ninja cinema.
This is my first Ho movie so I'm certainly no expert on his body of work, but from what I gather from the reviews written by more knowledgeable people, Ninja the Protector is totally consistent with his general "style" of filmmaking. AAV Creative Unit came up with an intriguing story of an evil ninja organisation that threatens to screw everything up. The police can't do much because (see the poster) only a ninja can defeat a ninja (!). Now where have we heard that already? Oh yeah, in just about every single ninja movie in existence.
But all is not lost - the leader of the police, played by Richard Harrison, is actually a ninja (!), so he spends part of the time in his office, explaining the grimness of the situation to his subordinates, and rest by walking around in his nicely coloured ninja outfit, beating the crap out of the evil ninja organisation's members and leaving them handcuffed for said subordinates to arrest and bring to the justice. Such a nice example of a split personality. Robert Louis Stevenson, eat your heart out!
However, this is not the only thing going on in the movie. To prevent the viewers from getting bored by the nonstop ninja action, Ho ingeniously created another subplot by inserting footage from some lame drama about two brothers, one of which is a model or something. Of course, with all the overdubbing, it's hard to know what (if anything) was going on in the original film, but in this one it is turned into a subplot of a police agent going undercover to infiltrate a model agency, which happens to be the cover for the more sinister doings of the Evil Ninja Organisation.
One thing you must absolutely avoid at all costs is trying to follow the "plot", as it will cause irreparable damage to your brain. Godfrey Ho is an artist and he's doesn't let such trivialities as logic and continuity get in the way of his creativity. More than once you will be baffled by some character mentioning the consequences of some event before that event has actually taken place. There's also a moment in which a character, through a flashback, remembers a soft and tender love scene which he didn't witness. The dubbing also has its own quirks - for example, in one scene a pissed off girlfriend, wanting to kick her boyfriend out, tells him to get off instead of out. Or maybe she really meant it?
It's not hard to see that Ninja the Protector is rightfully considered to be a masterpiece of modern cinema. Not only has Godfrey Ho given us two movies for the price of one (or perhaps none), bravely challenged our perception of time and space through the lack of continuity and the supernatural powers of the ninjas who are able to (dis)appear in a puff of smoke, not only has he given us a heartwarming drama that treats not only family relations but also the dangers of modelling (so we feel a massive relief when our lead character decides, quote, "to give up modelling immediately and lead a normal life"), drama powered by numerous but tasteful sex scenes (at least those that don't feature rape) that increase our sympathy for the characters (especially the one on the beach between the lead character's brother and some bimbo) - in addition to all this, we have an opportunity to listen to some really great music, like Jean Michel Jarre's Ethnicolor, Pink Floyd's One of These Days and many others. This music brings such depth to certain scenes that it was definitely worth stea... paying large sum of money for it.
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