Everything about the new version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles seems undercooked and as limp as Michelangelo’s digital ninja mask.
If you were thinking about seeing the latest version of Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, don’t.
If, somehow, you can’t take my word for it, let me take this opportunity to explain how you’re a dumbass if you do. To be fair, this reboot of the Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman creation had a tremendous amount of baggage tied to it in the run up to the release.
Produced by Michael Bay, fans were up in arms when an early version of the script leaked, saying that the titular turtles were no longer accidental freaks of nature, but rather space aliens. Once that was debunked (or rather hastily rewritten) the next hurdle was the leaking of character designs, which gave our half-shell heroes a weird pseudo-human look, with nostrils and actual lips, as you can see in the caption.
Unfortunately, there was no quick fix for that, so they pretty much said, “fuck it” and let it ride.
Going into the movie I had no real desire to see, I expected that since my expectations were set so low, some good action and a little comedy would at least make seeing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at least a little fun. I couldn’t be more wrong. While the movie does stick (for the most part) to some semblance of the source material, it also wildly veers away, making everything seem even more artificial than the overused CGI and motion capture, which, I have to admit, made me miss the Henson Studios practical effects from the 1990 film version.
As for the human characters, human sex doll Megan Fox stars as April O’Neil. While she’s pretty to look at, watching her attempt to act is nothing short of painful. While it’s clear she tries, I feel like even she knows her limitations and relies on the fact that 90 percent of the grown men who will pay to see this movie would kill their own parents if it meant having a chance to see her naked.
Along for the ride is Will Arnett, whose primary reason for being in the movie is to drive people around and earn alimony money for Amy Poehler. Supreme badass William Fichtner plays secondary banana/villain Eric Sacks, who somehow has been allowed to handle security for the entire city of New York with non-descript science, because maybe the police all got fired or something, hell, I don’t know.
The primary villain, as always, is the Shredder, played by some Asian guy who spends all his non-CGI scenes enveloped in partial shadow, even though you can clearly see the scarred makeup on his non-descript Asian face.
I’d take some time explaining the plot to you, but the truth is, there really isn’t one. Bad guys do bad things, Turtles appear, April O’Neill sees them, they find her, some weird interaction happens, she’s rightfully fired from her news job because she tries to tell her boss (what the FUCK are YOU doing here, Whoopi Goldberg?) that reptiles have swords and fight while forgetting to show her the one picture that she has on her cellphone that might NOT make her look like a lunatic.
Other shit happens, but at some point I just stopped caring…Except for one thing.
Normally, I wouldn’t spoil a movie, but I don’t give a shit about this movie in particular, and I’m pretty sure you won’t either, so here we go. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles features the largest lapse in plot or whatever resembles plot that I’ve seen in a long time. During a scene where April O’Neil sits down with rat daddy Splinter (inexplicably voiced by Tony Shalhoub, which doesn’t even fit a little bit, and I like the guy) to have the entire backstory explained to her (and us), Splinter explains how her scientist dad died in a fire that she was also in long enough to save himself and the four little mutated box turtles, who, in a tremendous act of love (after scenes showing baby O’Neil somehow being allowed to feed a rat and turtles pizza in their little tanks, yeah, I know) dumps them down into a sewer, because of course, that’s the safe choice.
Later in the film, William Fichtner tells O’Neil that he shot her father to death, and all I could wonder is was that before or after he burned alive. Because O’Neil has the same sort of short-term memory loss that I’m convinced Megan Fox actually has, she gets upset at this news, even though, just a few hours before, the talking rat she saved explained clearly to her that her old man died by fire. Um, OK. So either this film was heavily edited/rewritten during production, or, people just stopped giving a shit half way through.
None of this surprises me, as director Jonathan Liebesman (Darkness Falls, The Battle of Los Angeles) has a track record of dropping the ball on interesting concepts because he’s an awful director. While it’d be easy to chalk this up to not being able to get much out of CGI turtles, just one week ago, James Gunn and Marvel showed us that we could get pretty good amounts of emotion from a raccoon and a walking tree, and everything about that worked.
There is a way to make a movie about four talking turtles and a rat into something interesting. It happened in 1990, and it could happen again, but whatever this was, nothing about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comes close to good or entertaining.
Hashim R. Hathaway (Uncle Shimbo) is the host of the Never Daunted Radio Network, and proud father to NeverDaunted.Net. You can reach him on Twitter @NeverDauntedNet