One thing was certain in the 1980s: no matter who or what you were - alien, robot, time-traveler, kung-fu master - or where you came from - the future, the past, space, Australia - the second you showed up in the USA in regular times you would be attacked by muggers. And you would hilariously kick their fucking asses. The whosit this time around is an ancient samurai who gets frozen in a block of ice like a common mammoth and is thawed out in 1986 so he can solve our mugger problem and be "humorously" amazed by utterly inconsequential shit like, say, an airing of this movie on television. Later the people who thawed him out have a change of heart, so they kidnap him and throw him into the back of a van, like he's some 13-year-old girl walking home from school or something. Not that I would know anything about that. Fortunately for him this model of van is equipped with a "stab hole" (this is a hole in the front seat allowing people in the back to stab the driver with a sword; it's standard in unbelievably lazy movies), so he manages to impale the driver, the van crashes, and he escapes. Then the cops blow him away, which would probably be ironic if this movie knew what that meant.

There is one good part where the samurai disarms this dude - literally - but if that's what you're looking for I recommend downloading a real samurai movie, where something like that happens every five minutes. At least.