It's weird thinking that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been around in some form or fashion for thirty years. Even with the recent surge of 1980s nostalgia, I still can't quite wrap my head around seeing kids playing with toys and watching cartoons from a franchise that I was enjoying when I was a kid. I will admit, though, that when I'd heard Warner Bros. Pictures and Nickelodeon would be teaming up to create a brand new live-action Ninja Turtles movie to commemorate the franchise's thirtieth anniversary, I was very, very excited. And then I heard that Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes would be producing it, and all that excitement went away. But I just had to see it anyway, just to see how it would turn out. And this might sound like a copout answer, but ultimately, the movie is what it is.
For some time now, New York City has been terrorized by a criminal organization known as the Foot Clan. Local news reporter April O'Neil (Megan Fox) has spent quite a bit of that time trying to find something on the gang, hoping to break away from the lame puff pieces she's been stuck doing for months. While chasing a lead, she witnesses a shadowy figure interrupting a Foot Clan raid on the docks and knocking out everyone there. Her story about a mysterious vigilante is laughed out of the newsroom, only making April more determined to get to the bottom of what happened.
The Foot Clan, meanwhile, swears revenge on the vigilante that embarrassed them. To accomplish this, they take a number of hostages, with April coincidentally among them, at a subway station in an attempt to lure the vigilante out. The situation is broken up by not one, but four assailants, whom April follows out to some nearby rooftops. But she is shocked to discover that the four crimefighters are not human, but giant bipedal turtles.
Introducing themselves as Leonardo (Pete Ploszek, with the voice of Johnny Knoxville), Michelangelo (Noel Fisher), Donatello (Jeremy Howard), and Raphael (Alan Ritchson), the four karate-trained turtles bring her to their lair in the sewers beneath the city. April is immediately recognized by their sensei, a mutated rat named Splinter (Danny Woodburn, with the voice of Tony Shaloub). Her late father, a scientist, was instrumental in creating the mutagen that led to Splinter and the turtles arriving at their current anthropomorphic state, and Splinter remembers April as the little girl who saved the five animals from the lab fire that killed her father fifteen years earlier.
But little do they know that they're similarly tied to wealthy pharmaceutical manufacturer Eric Sachs (William Fichtner). A past associate of April's father, Sachs presents himself to the public as a charitable, philanthropic businessman. However, he's been secretly bankrolling the Foot Clan, and has a financial stake in their master plan to destroy New York City. And of course, it's up to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to save the day.
I desperately wanted to love this movie. I'd hoped that it would make me proud to be a Ninja Turtles fan. I wanted something that I could watch with new fans and share in the fun and excitement with them. But that's not what this movie is. It's a depressing movie because it has very little of the heart or charm that made me fall in love with the Ninja Turtles so long ago. It has its fun moments, but I honestly cannot call this new interpretation of the franchise a good movie.
The movie was directed by Jonathan Liebesman, whose body of work thus far hasn't been very impressive. In watching the movie, I came to think that Liebesman perhaps took some inspiration from Michael Bay's work on the Transformers movies. It feels constructed the same way, with similar cinematography, editing, and visual style. (This movie is thankfully an hour shorter than Bay's Transformers: Age of Extinction.) Liebesman here is almost a game of cinematic connect-the-dots, going from Point A to Point B to Point C without doing much to make the movie feel lively. There are some truly cool moments (the fight between Splinter and Shredder halfway through the movie stands out as one of the true highlights, in my opinion), but for the most part, Liebesman doesn't do much to make the movie anything other than dull.
But then again, the screenplay doesn't provide him with much of a blueprint to go from. While there are some cute gags and subtle references to the franchise's history for long-time fans to catch, the script fails to really provide much of anything worthwhile. Writers Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, and Evan Daugherty have practically stumbled right of the gate with this one. The story is convoluted and just plain stupid, the villains aren't intimidating, April O'Neil is a hollow placeholder for a character (and feels like a female version of Shia LaBeouf's character from the first three Transformers movies at times to boot), and the Ninja Turtles themselves rarely rise above the basest concepts of their characters. They don't have any personalities, just clichés sitting in where their personalities would be. It's the kind of script that comes across like Applebaum, Nemec, and Daugherty slapped it together at the last minute with as little effort as possible. Three different people worked on writing this movie and this is the best they could do?
Even the movie's post=production conversion into 3D is mediocre. There are some moments that look fantastic, especially the climactic rooftop battle between the Ninja Turtles and Shredder, but the 3D effects are mostly hit or miss. I've seen a few movies this summer that were converted into 3D and still looked really good, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is not one of them. It's another typical example of a 3D conversion that could have stood having a lot more effort put into it if it even had to be done at all.
And then there's the cast, who aren't bad but still not particularly impressive. Nobody will ever accuse Megan Fox of being a good actress, but she gives what I'd call on eof her best performances here. She's committed to the role and proves herself likable even if her talents are limited and the character is poorly written. And if Fox's character is similar to the lead character from the Transformers movies, then Will Arnett is playing one similar to the comic relief from the Transformers movies. Arnett starts out kinda funny, but the joke gets old fast and he's really annoying by the end of the movie.
While their characters are unfortunately flat, the actors playing Splinter and the Ninja Turtles are really good. They try their damnedest to infuse a little personality into their roles, and actually make them enjoyable. It just hurts to see that they're given almost nothing to work with. And they're also outshined by William Fichtner. I haven't seen Fichtner in many movies, but I've enjoyed his work every time I have and this time proves no exception. It's not his best work, and the character is poorly written as well, but Fichtner was still able to leave a positive impression, and I can't complain about that.
I must confess that I entered the movie a little biased. I fully expected it to suck, and that the Ninja Turtles I grew up with would outshine the ones from this movie any day. And while I cannot say that I completely hated the movie, I can't say I completely liked it either. It's the kind of movie that only really works if you have absolutely zero expectations whatsoever, and even then I'd say that would be pushing it. Watching it actually gave me flashbacks to the year 1993 and the last time someone made a live-action Ninja Turtles movie. And in those twenty years, Hollywood apparently failed to learn the lessons taught by that movie. So here's hoping that in the event that they do indeed make a sequel to this reboot, they'll actually make a good movie. Because honestly, I'm going to be really upset if the Ninja Turtles break my heart again.
Final Rating: **
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