No Surrender Cinema: Ninja Over the Great Wall

Get ready for more ninjas in this installment of No Surrender Cinema, as the men in black are pitted against a formidable foe. Two of the biggest genres in martial arts movie history combine in this story of one man’s battle against invading Japanese forces, with one of the world’s Seven Wonders as the setting! What do you get when you take a bit of Bruceploitation and add an army of ninjas to it? You get Ninja Over The Great Wall!

Starring Bruce Le, arguably the most famous of the Bruce Lee clones that found success in kung fu films after Lee’s untimely death, Ninja Over The Great Wall feels more epic in tone than any of Le’s films that preceded it. In fact, Le hadn’t even been in a film for 5 years until he made his return not only as the star of this film, but as its director also! Taking place in the 1930’s during the period where Japanese forces invaded China, Le plays Chi Keung, a young man who takes a stand when the military plunders and pillages his village. In the first few moments of the story, Keung witnesses his mother’s death at the hands of Japanese soldiers, but then has to save his girlfriend from being raped by one of them! Chi Keung is soon captured and presumed dead at the hands of a firing squad, but Yip manages to find him clinging to life, and the two escape through a field of dead bodies and rats. It’s a rather dark scene (both visually and in tone), but you know that Keung is going to use this new lease on life as the motivation for vengeance.

Sure enough, as Keung and Yip make their way to Beijing, Keung encounters Master Yeung being attacked by a group of ninjas and decides to lend a helping hand. This endears Keung to the grateful Master, who is being sought out by Shojiro, a Japanese man out to prove himself to his father Sakada. Shojiro and Master Yeung get their one on one battle, one which Shojiro is barely able to win, and the near-humiliation is enough for Shojiro’s father to order Master Yeung poisoned! Chi Keung realizes who is responsible and swears his revenge in a pretty theatrical way (he has a coffin delivered to Shojiro’s residence and says it’s for him!) before taking Shojiro on himself! The two are pretty evenly matched, but when Chi Keung gets the upper hand, Sakada calls on his ninja assassins to interfere! Chi Keung is ready to take them on, but Shojiro steps in and orders them to stand down, saying he could have done it himself. This leads to Shojiro taking leave to hone his skills, while his father orders his army of ninjas to carry out revenge against any and all of Master Yeung’s students.

This is the point where Ninja Over The Great Wall kicks things into high gear and we see Le’s skills on display in scene after scene against groups of nameless ninjas. Ninjas attack the school at night, awakening Chi Keung and sending him into an ass-kicking frenzy. When morning comes, the battle wages on, with Keung taking a katana and slicing and dicing his way through everyone. Then, all of a sudden, it’s night time again, and we get Chi Keung squaring off against a NINJA ON FIRE, who ends up getting kicked into a building and causing it to explode! Apparently the explosion was enough to send Keung several seasons into the future, because while the initial brawl appears to be taking place on a sunny spring day, we now see him draped in fur battling a batch of snow ninjas! Yes, a group of ninjas clad in white instead of the traditional black literally pop out of snow to ambush Chi Keung, who continues to dispatch of this ninja fodder as easily as GI Joe did to Cobra Troopers.

After this, the film cuts over to Shojiro’s journey, and we see him getting attacked by some fellow Japanese who feel embarrassed by his beating at the hands of Chi Keung. Shojiro has his life spared by a master who decides to help him regain his honor by teaching him in the ways of bushido. Shojiro’s intent to restore his honor seems to be noble, but when the “reclaiming of his warrior spirit” includes decapitating one of his Japanese assailants, kiling the rest, and being tested by his master (to see if he has the guts to kill a baby!?!?!), we know that he’s coming back for revenge on Chi Keung despite the latter’s warnings that he’ll kill him on sight.

With the grudge between both men having been built up for so long, the “main event” of the movie takes place on the film’s namesake, The Great Wall Of China! It’s a pretty impressive site watching hundreds if not thousands of extras carrying torches, lining the length of the wall until daylight approaches and our rivals are ready to square off. This gives the final fight even more of an epic feel as Shojiro is out to prove that he’s become a much more skilled fighter and is now harder for Chi Keung to handle, while Chi Keung’s nobility and resilience won’t allow him to bow down to anyone, especially not any of the invading Japanese forces. Not only is the final battle stylistically one of the best in the Bruceploitation genre, but the film takes a few final twists and turns that make this film feel much bigger in scope than the usual cash-grabs that a lot of Le’s earlier films felt like.

Bruceploitation was all but done by the point that Ninja Over The Great Wall was released (most state the release year as 1987, which seems to be the most accurate, although there are some sites claiming 1990 and even one claiming 1999, which it definitely is not), and as I mentioned before, Le went nearly half a decade in between his previous film and this one. Ninjas were still a hot commodity in the action world, although it could be argued that by 1987 even the wave of ninja-based fare had seen its peak come and go. Merging the two felt like an obvious move to make and Le was certainly smart for it, but in honestly this film doesn’t feel like either one of those genres. Yes, there are more than enough ninja fights for it to quality, and Le as the star will immediately stereotype this one as the latest in a long line of films from wannabe Bruce Lee’s, but Ninja Over The Great Wall goes beyond the limits of both of those themes and becomes something truly great in its own right. Amidst all of the action and some grim depictions of what happened during the era of Japan’s invasion of China, Le has put a lot of heart into this film. The story moves along well, there’s no gratuitous humor or nudity, and even with love letters to films like Fist of Fury (this film can be found under the alternate title Shaolin Fist of Fury in some places) the older, more mature Le has all but forsaken the persona that brought him the most fame. I would go so far as to say there’s more effort here than there needed to be, and it was an admirable approach to take.

Ninja Over The Great Wall might not have been what I had assumed it to be, but this was a case where things turned out better than I could have imagined. This is a great film, and Bruce Le should be commended for stepping outside of his comfort zone. It’s a shame that this film seems to have remained in relative obscurity while lesser films get more praise. Don’t believe me? See for yourself, because you can find this one on Tubi and YouTube right now! The thought of Bruce Lee (or at least one of his clones) fighting ninjas to the death was enough to draw me in, but what I discovered was a true hidden gem on the seemingly never-ending list of old-school Kung Fu films.