Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Review
Functionally entertaining.
Regular readers of my blog (all three of you. Hi mom!) should have by now realized that I have an issue with Michael Bay and his movies, and that by “issue” I mean to date I have hated him and his work with the burning passion of 10,000 suns. His style of movie making (no story, big explosions, treating source material like toilet paper during a prune and Mexican food festival, acting that barely compares favorably to watching department store mannequins stare at each other, dopey cartoonish CGI that obscures the action and special effects with action and special effects, and characters who develop only under protest and usually come out looking like a failed mad science experiment) is everything I think is wrong with mass market movie making and I arrived at the theater like the bastard love child of MacGuyver and Elmer Fudd: armed and equipped with every literary shotgun, rifle, bear trap, claymore, and excrement coated punji stick to take down another gigantic movie wildebeest and mount it’s head up on my trophy wall. Imagine my surprise when I walked out of the theater realizing I had just seen the best movie of my life.
Wait, did I just write that correctly? No. What I meant to say was I had just seen the best Michael Bay movie of my life. On another day that might be like saying that the sand filled garden hose I had just been beaten with was made of the softest rubber available or that the piece of my brain they removed was the least important lobe but as the movie progressed I found myself warming up to the CGI turtles and being reasonably entertained. At no point during the movie did I want to see another human in the theater bleed (including myself or the projectionist. Surprises never cease) and at the end I felt like I had gotten my monies worth from the experience. It wasn’t a bargain and it wasn’t enriching but it did serve to entertain.
(note-I know there are those of you out there who will say the Rock was Michael Bay’s best movie but honestly if you go back and watch it again and mentally block out the stunning presences of Sean Connery and adequate presence of Nicholas Cage you will realize what schock it really was)
That’s not to say this movie was good. It still had all the problems that plague all Platinum Dunes productions. Too many humans, not enough of whatever we are here to see. A hot chick who adds nothing to the movie besides some PG eye candy. Story written using the million monkeys on a million typewriters approach sans about 999,984 monkeys. Dialog that makes me wish we all spoke in clicks and whistles. CGI that makes Pete’s Dragon look realistic. Acting that makes me nostalgic for the days of my second grade production of Robin Hood (I was guard #3). Yet for all that the actual turtle characters were fun and the action, while not necessarily exciting, was excitement adjacent. I am nothing if not honest and as much as I’d like to bury this one under a deluge of black holes and whiny complaints I cannot.
However let’s talk about a couple of things that did bug me. First off, the source material. Michael Bay, can you please stop playing with my toys? While they turtles were cool and actually had the right weapons that was pretty much the only nod towards the actual source material whatsoever. No prior interaction between Splinter and the Foot Clan or Shredder. No ooze. No Casey Jones (that one hit hard. He was my favorite TMNT character). Now it’s all some kind of weird science experiment and Splinter learns ninjitsu from a book he finds in the sewer (lame).
Let’s also talk about Megan Fox. You have to understand as horny as I am it takes a lot for me to despise a girl as hot as she is but she managed to pull it off. For the life of me I cannot figure out what she was doing in this film. Didn’t Michael Bay fire her off Transformers for talking smack about him? In my opinion she does not read well as April O’Neil nor does she sound or act like a reporter. Her acting was so wooden it looked and felt like a cold script read. She does not even show any skin aside from her hands and (admittedly) gorgeous face. The little girl they hired to play 8 year old April was a better actress and contributed more to the film. The weight of the human acting was carried by the very talented Will Arnett but since he was playing the comic relief I don’t know how to weight his performance.
Last thing before I get into the story is the turtles themselves. Everyone knows they are super tough mutant turtles who were trained to be ninjas by Splinter (plus they are teenagers). The are fast, strong, and hard to kill. They are not Superman. The writers of this film didn’t read that memo so now the TMNT are strong enough to literally throw ocean containers (tare weight 4,916 lbs (2,219 KG)) around and are bullet proof. Once that is established any tension we might have felt as they ripped through Foot Clan guys armed with assault rifles disappears. I guess building concern for your characters is not a primary goal of modern movie goers.
The story is of the city of New York laboring under a crime wave from the Foot Clan (somehow everyone in the world knows who the Foot Clan is (except for the audience) and they are called the Foot Clan because they “step on the neck of all who oppose them”. I wish I were kidding. So much for the Foot Clan being a secret ninja clan) who run around with guns looking more like terrorists than ninjas. April O’Neil (Megan Fox-Jennifers Body, Transformers, Johan Hex (hahahahaha) is a fluff piece reporter who dreams of being a real journalist. She is driven around by her camera man Vernon Fenwick (Will Arnett-Arrested Development, the Nut Job, the Lego Movie). She is investigating a Foot Clan theft of a bunch of chemicals and sees the turtles stopping it. They track her down and get her camera. (Foot Clan logo image courtesy of the Cartoon T Shirt category)
She tries to convince her editor (Whoopie Goldberg-Ghost, Star Trek the Next Generation, the View) of the validity of the turtles but is shot down. Meanwhile April meets up with Eric Sachs (William Fichtner-Drive Angry, the Lone Ranger, Elysium), a wealthy owner of a chemical company her father used to work for (SPOILER ALERT by the way if you see this film and didn’t in the first 5 seconds of seeing this character on the screen thing “This guy will turn out to be the bad guy” there is something seriously wrong with you pattern recognition ability. If you see a yellow house do you circle it completely to make sure it’s yellow on all sides? What if someone painted the front while you were looking at the back? Better keep circling). She also has some kind of flashback about how her father created the turtles and Splinter and reminds Sachs of that.
More SPOILER ALERT. Of course Sachs works for the Shredder (Tohoru Masumune-the Monogamy Experiment, Greencard Warriors, Inception) leader of the Foot Clan. Also the serum that allowed the TMNTs to become what they are can also cure the results of a massive toxic spill (oh, yeah. The truly idiotic evil plan is to release a bunch of toxic chemicals into New York City and then force control of the city over to the Foot Clan when they come up with a cure for it. What, they are going to name Shredder the Mayor of New York? Ask Bill de Blasio how much actual power comes with that position. Whatever happened to making a ton of money or using your ninja skills to infiltrate and control from behind the scenes? Can someone come up with an evil plan that doesn’t sound like an 8 year old wrote it? Lucas I blame you). The Foot Clan takes a bunch of people hostage in order to flush out the turtles.
I’m not really motivated to keep on with this. The story is the weakest part of this film. The turtles save everyone including April from the Foot Clan but their high tech secret sewer base is attacked and all but Raphael are captured. Raph and April attack Sachs house and rescue everyone, then go after the toxic waste bomb at the top of a skyscraper (I guess these guys saw the Amazing Spiderman and really liked it). The Shredder kicks 10 kinds of crap out of the turtles but in the end is foiled. Michael Bay must have felt the movie was really, really short on explosions as he literally pulls a rocket launcher out of his ass in the last 5 minutes and uses it to blow up a car.
The stars:
For all it’s faults I got to like the Turtles. They each had character, their dialog was not the hackneyed cowabunga crap I was expecting, and they pretty much acted like teenagers. Two stars. I also like Splinter a lot. I have been playing Skaven in Warhammer for years and seeing a giant bipedal rat kick ass makes me happy. Plus he was also reasonably true to the manga. One star. The action was pretty good. I guess Michael Bay ran out of pyrotechnics after the last film and every scene was not obscured by huge explosions. The fight with the Shredder at the end was especially fun. One star. If you recall how in the manga the TMNT were actual ninjas who killed guys and by the time the second movie and cartoons came out they were throwing slices of pizza at people? This movie did something either brilliantly intentional or accidentally brilliant and let them go back to that but then let the thick fog of the PG-13 rating keep the action safely ambiguous. You see Leonardo hack at guys with is katana but thanks to PG-13 you don’t see the blood so you are kind of left wondering if a guy just got eviscerated or not. It’s actually one of the best uses of PG-13 I’ve seen to date. One star. In general I found myself enjoying the film along with a massive heard of unwashed sheeple in the audience. One star. Total: six stars.
The black holes:
Story was dumb. One black hole. Human acting distractingly bad, and way too much of the humans. One black hole. The turtles looked way too cute and cartoonish IMO. With a huge CGI budget can’t you hire a couple of actual comic book cartoonists to help you with the look? One black hole. Forcing me to suffer through another Megan Fox acting session without having her bending over to fix a motorcycle in Daisy Dukes is an insult to my libido. There wasn’t a bikram yoga class she needed to attend somewhere in the script? Talk about doing the time without enjoying the crime. One black hole. Taking the very rich history of the TMNTs and simplifying it into “they were grow in a lab” is very typical of Platinum Dunes but annoying as hell. Also the April childhood tie in to the turtles was particularity dumb. One black hole. Total: 5 black holes.
A grand total of 1 star. In a normal movie that would be dead center of mediocre but for a Michael Bay reboot film that’s Oscar worthy. I cannot honestly say this film is not worth your $12. If you are a fan or just like dumb action films you should enjoy it? Date movie? Normally I would say no but there was a couple in the row in front of me where the girl was drop dead gorgeous and clearly bored as hell but her boyfriend insisted she watch it. I guess it helps that he looks like he spends more time in the gym than at work in a day (ladies-never trust a guy who has that much free time and energy to dedicate to washboard abs) so I guess if you look really good you could drag her to it? I would not. Bathroom break? Any of the scenes with April trying to prove to the world what a great reporter she is would be completely flushable (haw!). Sorry Whoopie. I love you for Star Trek but if you see a scene with her in it feel free to take that time to empty your waste collection organs.
Thanks for reading. I’m marathon writing today and am about to start up on my the Giver review. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have comments on this film or my review feel free to post them here. Off topic questions or suggestions send them to my email. Have a great night.
the Infamous Dave Inman
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