Review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) by Brykotyk — 07 Aug 2014

Ultimately it’s just kind of… there. It’s bland. Most of the things that make the TMNT franchise feel special have been sanded off to make a very generic modern superhero movie, but one that does almost everything worse than the rest do. There’s a brief action scene that’s sort of like a key early sequence in Batman Begins, just… worse. The origin backstory for the Turtles and Splinter and the entire climax scene are photocopies of The Amazing Spider-Man, just… worse. They add nothing to what came before. None of it’s memorable. It’s just there.

If I can give some praise, I’ll give it to Noel Fisher. He’s a good Michelangelo. The few times I found myself smiling, it was because of his performance. Easily the high point.

The script is awful. Nothing makes a bit of sense. Eric Sacks’ evil master plan is to pump the city full of deadly gas and use the curative properties of the mutagen (a shoehorned-in aspect of the IDW comic series that’s just kinda… there, overcomplicating things for no specific reason) to play the “saviour” and cure everyone, and also receive a big government payday. He’s doing it to get rich, even though he’s clearly already crazy rich, with a palatial mountain estate and his own corporate tower in Manhattan. He has no additional motivation. And his actual plan is laughably stupid - he has the Shredder pump the bright red poison gas out from the top of his tower in the city… which would be immediately noticed by absolutely everyone and reveal that he was behind it all along. How does this plan end with anything but him in a prison cell?

The Shredder himself? He doesn’t need to be in this movie. He serves no purpose. He’s just there to fight Splinter and the Turtles, nothing more. He has no motivation and no character. And even then, he’s almost comically bad at being the big bad villain - he just leaves characters “for dead” twice, who of course turn out to be alive, for no good reason at all. Just, welp, I’m leaving now because whatever. Just to give the movie some cheap drama.

This movie doesn’t really have much of a plot to speak of. I think it might have more plot holes than actual plot. Plot holes you could drive a Turtle Van through. (Hey, how’s that for a DVD pull quote?).

It also doesn’t have any real characters; they’re all pretty broad, basic archetypes at best. There’s no real character development or “arc” for anyone. They try to shoehorn one in for Raphael at the end, but the only setup is a very brief scene early on where he threatens to abandon his family. Not much more comes of it, and his big “emotional breakthrough” falls totally flat. They’re trying to have a big character moment without doing the work to set it up.

In fact, there are a number of attempts at “serious”/emotional scenes that were completely laughable. There was nothing to sell them. They weren’t earned and fell flat. The movie does almost nothing to make you care about these characters - it’s assuming you already do, and that makes it fail on the most basic story level.

The mo-cap technology used is impressive on a technical level, but the directing make it impossible to believe they’re “real”. Part of that is because all of the shots with no humans in them (and there are a bunch) are in full CGI, and there’s no “real camera” to speak of. The way the digital camera zooms in and flies around looks incredibly fake and downright physically impossible, which makes all of those scenes feel like a cartoon or a video game. It doesn’t match up with the “real” footage at all, so it’s a really jarring, distracting fit that highlights how unreal the Turtles are. In a movie like this, it was the worst possible choice they could have made.

The action sequences are obnoxious. In fact, the entire movie seems to be directed by a 12-year-old with ADHD. The camera is constantly swooping in and out and tilting into dutch angles and spinning around and shaking with no rhyme or reason. There’s a scene where some random schlub answering a phone gets a dramatic camera swoop. It’s insane. There are no real storytelling skills on display here; it’s just trying to be as busy as possible so you won’t notice. At times it’s downright incomprehensible.

There’s really not that much more to say about it. It’s a bad movie. It’s pretty forgettable. You can barely even call it a movie, or a story, at all. It’s a bunch of mediocre video-game cut scenes sloppily cut together as a movie. But worst of all, it doesn’t do anything to stand out from the most generic superhero-style action movies out there. And for a TMNT movie, that’s probably the worst thing that can be said about it.

And that’s the thing… none of my main criticisms have anything to do with the changes to the Turtles’ designs, or the changes to the backstory, or Megan Fox, or any of the other reasons that have set the fanbase on edge. It’s all to do with this being a poorly-written, poorly-made movie on its own merits. There’s nothing worthwhile about it.