A Life Through Film #046: Beverly Hills Ninja

Don't let the title and imagery of this movie fool you. It's a dark one this week, folks.

Release Date: 1/17/1997

Weeks at Number One: 1

Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!

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“The notion of love is something that would be a wonderful thing. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it, other than the love of my family. At this point it’s something beyond my grasp. But I can imagine it, and longing for it makes me sad.”

- Chris Farley

I don’t think you can point to any individual aspect of Chris Farley’s life and claim it’s what killed him. His people-pleasing personality, addictions, religious trauma, and low self-esteem are all obvious culprits, but the way that these internal factors interacted with his family, fame, and relationship with show business amplified a chaotic downward spiral for the comedian. To say it was one thing and one thing only wouldn’t just be reductive, but disrespectful to Farley’s memory.

Most of the information for today’s column is sourced from The Chris Farley Show, a loving biography and oral history of its subject written in part by his brother, Tom. As the book tracks the actor’s tumultuous final two years of life, it takes care to explore Chris’s multiple facets.

He was a man who found most of his value in making others laugh, even as the increasingly silly ways he went about it wreaked havoc on his self esteem. He was a beloved actor and an intensely kind friend and brother who didn’t see himself as deserving of the love others tried to give him in return. Efforts to cope with these emotions fueled his addictions to drinking, drugs, and overeating. Despite the goofy antics he was known for onscreen, Chris Farley was caught in a dire battle with his own demons when the cameras were off.

The struggles that the comedian faced in his final years have their roots in his first major relapse. After three years of proud sobriety, Farley fell into a dark place just before Christmas of 1995. He began drinking heavily again, and became destructive enough to cause $6000 of damages to a hotel room after an early screening of Black Sheep. He found sobriety again following a stint in rehab, but where it had been easy and passive before, it was now a struggle that kept him on edge. It wouldn’t last.

What caused this initial relapse? Again, it’s impossible to point to one thing. Farley had been fired from Saturday Night Live just a few months prior, the dissolution of a dream the Wisconisite had had since he was a child. The filming of Black Sheep had been trying due to a number of factors, and in the end it had permanently damaged Farley’s relationship with one of his best friends, David Spade. On top of this professional stress, Farley was still indulging in his addictive tendencies by continuing to overeat, meaning he was closer to his old dangerous habits than he wanted to admit.

Of course, in the spirit of this column, we could always look at the man’s filmography from the time. I won’t sit here and tell you that the movies that Chris Farley made during this period are what killed him, but it wouldn’t be accurate to say they played no part in his worries. Tommy Boy [3.5/5] had reviewed poorly, but it was a cult hit that its stars were proud of. By contrast, Farley absolutely hated the final cut of Black Sheep, calling it “Tommy Boy II but worse” in morose conversations with friends.

At the same time that the actor realized that he couldn’t honestly endorse the movie that had taken up months of his life and ruined one of his closest friendships, he received an utterly abysmal rewrite for his next project. The panic set in. Farley struggled with the idea that all he would ever make for the rest of his life were shitty comedies that relied more and more on jokes at his expense. This was around December of 1995, just before that fateful first relapse.

This week’s movie is Chris Farley’s final starring role to release while he was still alive. The main joke in it is that he’s a fat, white ninja.

Beverly Hills Ninja doesn’t even sound like a real movie title. It sounds like a parody of one that the characters in a smug 90s show would talk about as they decried the lowering quality of Hollywood productions. A comedic portmanteau of Beverly Hills Cop and a cheap ninja movie trend, crammed full of gross out humor? I can practically smell the Blockbuster where a dusty copy of it would sit on the discount shelf next to The Relic and Maximum Risk.¹

In an effort to translate the badass martial arts action of stars like Jean-Claude Van Damme to something that kids could easily enjoy, movie studios went all in on ninjas in the ‘90s. Something about these ancient shinobi warriors had massive appeal to the youth of that decade, especially when the archetype was given some fun twists.

The trend dates back to the ‘80s, when the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon aired. This glorified toy commercial laid the groundwork for the kind of crossover success that guarantees a decades long legacy. The live action adaptation of the show in 1990 didn’t just have the biggest opening weekend for an independent film ever at the time, it went on to be the 9th highest grossing movie of the entire year.²

From there, the ninjutsu floodgates flew open. The 3 Ninjas movie series imagined young white kids busting out flying kicks amid righteous combat. Power Rangers combined Super Sentai footage from Japan with American actors to massive success on both little and big screens [the 1995 Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie? Worse than you probably remember. 2/5]. The arcade and home console success of Mortal Kombat and its starring ninjas caused both a moral panic that led to modern ESRB ratings system and a media empire that is still around today .

Was there anything to all this besides kids loving people in cool outfits doing punches and kicks? You could maybe argue that it was part of a larger trend of American youths getting into Japanese media, since dubbed anime like Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon were starting to appear on Cartoon Network at around this time. But ninjas in kids media were often so abstracted from their historical roots that it was tough to even connect them back to Japan.

Maybe it’s just fun for kids to combine the mysticism of wizards with the kung fu action of Bruce Lee movies. I know interest in that fusion powered me through quite a few volumes of Naruto back in elementary school.

Chris Farley knew that kids would love a silly movie where he played a wacky ninja. That was one of the ways he justified taking the lead role of Haru in Beverly Hills Ninja, anyway. The movie’s script about a hapless white guy raised in a Japanese dojo who travels to Los Angeles to get into hijinks and fight criminals was not written for Farley. The project had been floating around since at least 1990, with fellow SNL alum Dana Carvey attached to star early on. Carvey decided against it in the end and opted to do the Wayne’s World movie instead, a much wiser career choice [3.5/5].

Farley himself had been offered Beverly Hills Ninja before and had turned it down. The style of comedy in the movie leaned heavily into farcical slapstick, which, granted, he was really good at. But the comedian had always been careful to avoid leaning fully into “fatty falls down” type of humor. Farley was more than just a big dude who could pratfall, after all; he had a lot of charm as a Midwestern everyman who could deliver all kinds of written jokes in between all the cartwheels. Beverly Hills Ninja only wanted to see how funny he could look flopping around like a clown.

So how did he come around to the project? Simply put, its producers cornered him.

Farley was filming Black Sheep in the summer of ‘95 when he was approached by Tristar. The buzz around the comic as a film star was growing, even as his second starring role was still being filmed, and the studio wanted to capitalize. They offered Farley $6 million to star in Beverly Hills Ninja, a huge sum that dwarfed the meager rate he was earning for his current movie, thanks to a scummy deal with Paramount.

Despite the payday potential, Chris Farley still wasn’t sure. Basically everyone in his life was telling him not to don the ninja spandex. Beverly Hills Ninja was moronic, pure and simple, and starring in it would make everyone think that Farley was just a stupid oaf. But the actor couldn’t shake the advice he had received from his father. Thomas Farley, a humble Midwesterner without much Hollywood knowledge, told his son that if the studio was willing to pay him $6 million, he oughta just do the movie.

“You just don’t turn down that kind of money,” Thomas advised his boy.

Chris, who spent his life seeking the man’s approval, heeded his guidance.

To be fair to Farley, at first he was really trying with Beverly Hills Ninja. He was still sober during early pre-production, and began to train daily in martial arts in order to get physically ready for movie’s stunts. He collaborated with screenwriters Mark Feldberg and Mitch Klebanoff to turn the raunchy screenplay into something kids and families could enjoy. Farley’s logic was that if it had to be stupid beyond belief, Beverly Hills Ninja should at least be fun for kids. It was the fall of 1995, and he was still confident in his ability to keep his upward momentum.

The version of Chris Farley that showed up to film Beverly Hills Ninja in early 1996 was far more shaky and unsure of himself, and the screenplay he was working with was equally altered. The original script that Dana Carvey had decided against making years prior was, somehow, an adult-oriented romantic comedy. The screenwriters and producers had taken Farley’s notes about making the movie more suitable for kids and proceeded to write a moronic farce that still stumbles over enough crude humor to make it inappropriate for its target audience.

I’m not about to sit here and tell you that movies aimed at a younger audience are secretly the smartest movies being made every year, As I write this, A Minecraft Movie is the biggest cinematic event of 2025. But what that movie and Beverly Hills Ninja fail to understand is that kids are smart enough to understand good jokes, actually. Clever setups and logical punchlines work at basically any age. Something like The LEGO Movie, a great movie that will eventually appear in this column, has plenty of bright colors and funny visual gags for the kiddies, but it’s also filled with hilarious bits that everyone in the family can laugh at.

Beverly Hills Ninja takes the easier approach and reduces its comedy to four basic categories: fatty falls down jokes, fish out of water bits, gross out gags, and racism.

The level to which Beverly Hills Ninja reduces its star to a parody of himself is downright character assassination. Yes, Chris Farley was a big guy, and yes, he could absolutely crush physical comedy bits thanks to a commitment to getting laughs that was frankly unhealthy. But anyone who’s watched Tommy Boy or more than a handful of his SNL sketches knows he was more than that. He was a surprisingly adept character actor, able to inhabit total weirdos and concerned bystanders with equal ability, all without ever having to fall on his ass. Beverly Hills Ninja doesn’t care about this version of Farley at all.

Instead, the movie is filled to bursting with jokes of protagonist Haru clumsily traipsing through various set piece locales and, inevitably, falling over. I’d be lying if I said this comedy was never effective; a running gag involving Haru’s inability to gracefully use the astral plane like other ninjas got me each time. But even if you don’t know anything about Chris Farley, it’s just tiresome and repetitive. And if you do know who he is, it’s frankly insulting.

The main narrative gimmick of Beverly Hills Ninja is that a Japanese ninja clan find an abandoned white baby one day and, in hopes of fulfilling an ancient prophecy, raise him as part of their dojo. Even though that baby is raised exactly like his ripped, chiseled peers, he grows up to be Chris Farley. Despite literally dedicating his entire life to the practice of stealth and martial arts, Haru fails at both to “hilarious” effect at all times, perhaps implying a genetic predisposition to being a lummox. In his quest to prove himself, he follows a beautiful blonde (future Desperate Housewives star Nicollette Sheridan) to Los Angeles when he detects that she’s in danger from her counterfeiter boyfriend.

Comedies don’t need to have great plots to deliver good jokes. Airplane! [4/5] is basically just about a plane disaster and a couple getting back together, and it’s funny as hell! What’s important is to have a comedic premise that makes use of the talent you have on hand, and Beverly Hills Ninja fails deeply at that. If you want Chris Farley acting funny in a ninja outfit, fine. If you want him clumsy in a ninja outfit, fine. But why would he be like that after a literal lifetime of training? Couldn’t you just have him be a normal American white guy who trained at the dojo for a few months and now has to save the day? Just do Police Academy but it’s one guy trying to be a ninja!

The central joke of Beverly Hills Ninja should have been that everyone expects Haru to be an oaf, but he’s a surprisingly capable fighter and spy. Farley would have been more capable of selling this. On top of the martial arts training he was already doing, the guy had crazy physicality that allowed him to cartwheel and backflip with ease. If you want Haru to fall down a lot, fine, make him jittery in front of his love interest. Anything would have been better than what we got.

Farley is expected to just fall down and play the clown over and over again in Beverly Hills Ninja. He gets one moment of competence at the end purely for plot convenience, but that’s it. Fatty falls down, ad nauseum, the end. It’s a woeful misuse of the movie’s lead, and one that paints him as the ultimate fool. Haru isn’t meant to be a hero to root for, he’s a nimrod to be embarrassed by.

The contrast between this character and the titular hero of Tommy Boy is brutal. Tommy was awkward and pretty silly, but he was good enough at appealing to his fellow man that you can’t help but root for him. There’s nothing to root for when you watch Haru continually make a moron out of himself.

There are at least a few jokes that I laughed at while watching Beverly Hills Ninja, meaning its comedic highs peak higher than Black Sheep. But unlike Farley’s previous film, we’ve got quite a lot of racism to parse through to get to the good stuff.

The movie’s baseline depiction of Japanese people as either wise sages or criminal yakuza is tough to stomach even before we get to an overly-long scene of Haru in yellow face. It’s not an isolated incident either. One of the most irritating parts of the movie is the fact that Farley constantly speaks with this stilted affectation to mimic the accented English of his sensei. This most often comes across by his refusal to use contractions, but the repeated attempts of using “Shit-Oh!” as a catchphrase when things went wrong nearly made me sick.

Beverly Hills Ninja is built around Farley’s performance, so what can I even say about everything else about it? It looks awful and has a truly egregious score and soundtrack (three uses of “Kung Fu Fighting”!). The rest of the cast is barely worth mentioning, and that includes Chris Rock in a highly annoying side role.³ The brief moments of action are uninspired, limp affairs that pale in comparison to even other kiddy action flicks of the time. Director Dennis Dugan had shot the golf in Happy Gilmore [4/5] surprisingly well, but clearly he had no interest in learning fight direction.

There were enough decent jokes in Beverly Hills Ninja to save it from being the worst movie I’ve ever watched for this series, maybe even enough so that a kid watching might really like it.⁴ I did not even come close to liking it. The main thing I felt while Beverly Hills Ninja played out on my computer screen was despondent.

Farley was tense and nervous all while making the movie. He maintained his sobriety until the end of principal photography, but walked away unsure of the film’s quality. He had relapsed again by the time they needed him for reshoots later in ‘96. The rest of the year was tumultuous for Farley as months of sobriety kept giving way to his addictions, before a quick trip to rehab dried him out and started the cycle all over again. When he finally saw an early screening of Beverly Hills Ninja, the star pulled his manager into a side room and sobbed into his shoulder.

The movie’s star wasn’t Beverly Hills Ninja’s only hater. The flick has an abysmal 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, with only a handful reviews even giving it barely passing grades. The exception is Mick LaSalle from the San Francisco Chronicle, who gave it 4 out 5 stars and heaped high praise on its laughs, even as he could see that Farley deserved better work:

Perhaps it's too early to start taking Farley really seriously. But he's too good, too funny and too in control of his out-of-controlness to be a mere buffoon.

Despite his unease, Farley was once again three months sober by the film’s release in January of ‘97. Beverly Hills Ninja marked his third straight starring role to debut atop the US Box Office, thanks to a surprisingly decent $12 million gross. The success wouldn’t last though.

The box office receipts for the movie fell off a steep cliff the following weekend and never recovered. People rejected it so quickly after release that Jerry Maguire, nearly two months into its theatrical run, was able to take the top spot from Beverly Hills Ninja the week after it was the biggest movie in America.

A month after its release, Beverly Hills Ninja was failing to earn even a million dollars a weekend. A month after that, it couldn’t even bring in one hundred thousand. Despite this, the movie lingered in some theaters until June, when it mercifully left the box office with an overall domestic gross of only $31 million. The international release barely pushed the needle to an overall takeaway of around $38 million. Given the movie’s $18 million budget, that’s a hit by the thinnest of margins, but its effect on its star’s psyche was hardly worth it.

Shortly after the movie’s release, Farley relapsed again, this time surrounded by many fellow SNL alum at the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. More than a few of them directly expressed their disappointment in him, especially famous asshole Chevy Chase. Perhaps in an effort to scare the young addict straight by going straight for the heart, Chase invoked the name of one of Farley’s heroes:

Look, you’re not John Belushi. And when you overdose or kill yourself, you will not have the same acclaim that John did. You don’t have the record of accomplishment that he had…you don’t have the same cultural status that he had. You haven’t had the chance to get that far, and you’re already screwing yourself up.

Farley spent most of 1997 indulging in enough dangerous drinking, drug use, sex workers, and overeating that studios weren’t calling anymore. The comic was too much of an insurance liability to hire, and as he pushed away more and more friends with his behavior, Farley lost the connections that could have brought him back to working sobriety. Worse, these relapses were beginning to be more and more public, none more so than an SNL hosting job in October that showed everyone watching at home just how far Farley had fallen.

In the early morning hours of December 18th, 1997, Chris Farley collapsed in his apartment while arguing with a prostitute. He had been indulging in cocaine and heroin on a bender that had kept him awake for the previous four days. He died soon after she stole his watch and left. He was 33.

Beverly Hills Ninja didn’t kill Chris Farley. It’s a stupid comedy that didn't help his already plummeting self-esteem, but it wasn’t what set him on his fatal path. The Chris Farley Show does a great job exploring its subject’s many mental health struggles, from his complicated relationship with his father to the self-destructive interplay between his addictions and his Catholic guilt. It’s a devastating book that’s worth a read in full, but one part that really stood out to me was how Farley’s dedication to making other people happy twisted into a negative spiral in his own mind.

Farley only saw himself as valuable if he could make others laugh, so he’d go to any lengths to do that. As these efforts became more embarrassing and professionally damaging, they further deteriorated his self-worth and drove him further away from those who loved him most. Anyone who’s ever been even a bit of a people pleaser, myself included, knows how addicting that validation can be. Farley, who already had an addictive personality, grew to crave its effects like any other drug.

If Chris Farley had survived, would he have found the more serious dramatic work that he craved? A Fatty Arbuckle biopic that he saw as his gateway to more prestigious work was one of the major projects put on hold by his constant relapses and benders, but who’s to say what would have happened if that dream project had gotten made? One thing’s for sure, Adam Sandler would have kept Farley employed forever. And that’s not speculation either; the Sandman said as much in a musical tribute to his fallen friend a few years ago.

As a member of Sandler’s regular crew in the 2000s (alongside pals like Spade and Rock), Farley could have maintained the kind of stability and routine that may have helped keep him clean long-term. The fratty studio comedies of that era would have been a perfect fit for him to display both his physical prowess and dialogic expertise; a pairing with fellow clown Will Ferrell or against sardonic straight man Vince Vaughn likely wouldn’t have led to the critical acclaim that Farley desired, but God, it would have been a riot.

Alternatively, he may have found his calling in animation. The only work that Farley found in the midst of his 1997 tailspin was a project that he was extremely proud of and excited for, as it would be the first role that relied solely on his ability to deliver dialogue. It relied on the pure acting chops that Farley was desperate to show off. Like the actor, his character was judged by others by his appearance despite a hidden, sad depth. Layers, if you will.

By the time he passed away, Farley had recorded most of the dialogue as the titular character in Shrek. Dreamworks, still a new company by this point, shelved the project for a year after the actor’s death, and even considered casting a Farley soundalike to finish the last lines needed. Eventually, work on the film was fully restarted with Mike Meyers as Shrek, Scottish accent in tow.

For years, none of the late actor’s version of Shrek was made public, but a couple of animatics that use his dialogue have since been officially released. The late Farley’s interpretation of Shrek is a bit gruffer, more serious, and focused on proving himself to his parents, a character wrinkle totally absent from the released film. It’s impossible to say if the movie would be as much a commercial behemoth as Meyers’s rendition, but I do think it would have given the troubled Farley something to be proud of as he fought his personal demons.

You shouldn’t watch Beverly Hills Ninja. It’s both a bad movie and a poor way to remember its star. It’s a shame that even with so few entries into the man’s filmography, there aren’t many worth checking out this long after his death. Of all Farley’s cinematic work, Tommy Boy is the only one I can easily recommend. The rest fail to capture the diversity of his comedic talents, at least if he’s in the lead.⁵ Thankfully, there’s a cornucopia of SNL sketches starring Farley to check out, many of which live on as some of the best the show was doing in that era, so you can get a good sense of his work without resorting to watching crap like this week’s movie.

I hope that, somehow, Chris Farley knows that he’s brought me a lot of joy over the past year as I’ve researched him and his work. I don’t have a lot of kind things to say about his movies, but everything I’ve read and seen about the man paints him as a genuinely kind, big-hearted guy. It’s a sad truth that sometimes our brightest sources of collective joy hold intense darkness within them. I’ll spare you the joke of Pagliacci going to the doctor, but it’ll always hold a lot of truth.

I don’t think there’s some great cultural lesson to learn from the sad end to a troubled man. And Lord only knows there’s nothing of value to glean from Beverly Hills Ninja. It’s just sad all around.

Rating: 1.5/5

Works Cited

Next Week: Well that was a bummer. Let’s mix it up a bit with the next column. By virtue of the Special Edition re-releases, we’ll be able to track the entire cinematic arc of Star Wars in this column from the beautiful beginning to the bitter end. Rather than run individual columns for each film, we’ll be collating the Original Trilogy and their digital alterations into one piece as we mark the moment that Star Wars movies officially became more marketing than art.

See you then!

-Will

1. In this hypothetical, those two movies are less dusty because enough people have caught on that they’re surprisingly fun

2. I haven’t watched that first TMNT movie since I was a kid but I remember it being cool as heck. Do with that as you will

3. Farley himself advocated for Rock’s casting, since he otherwise wouldn’t have had any other friends on set with him

4. I wouldn’t show this to kids, by the way. On top of the racism, it’s surprisingly leering given the fact there’s only one woman with a name in the whole film. Farley wanted this to be for families and there’s straight up a scene at a strip club, though the setting does give the comedian a chance to bust a move up on the stage

5. Farley’s all too brief cameo in Billy Madison is easily the best part about that movie [2.5/5]