Review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) by Cameron G — 05 Sep 2016

+ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a maddeningly stupid movie, the type of movie that makes you throw your hands up at the screen at every plot absurdity or gratuitous slow-motion action sequence and ask, "How did this happen? Who *let* this happen?" It's the realization of every TMNT fan's fear of what Michael Bay would do with another beloved IP, and yet somehow it's worse than expected.

+ The most offensive part of this mess is how lazy it is. Even though it's an origin story in practice, the film leans heavily on the audience's familiarity with the characters and doesn't bother to do any of the heavy lifting with little things like character development. The turtles in particular are flat as paper outside of the one personality note for each, and the audience is hit over the head with that note for 90 minutes. Rafael is an angry loner, Michelangelo is the comic relief, Donatello is a nerd, and Leonardo is the leader because everyone says he is. The filmmakers are in such a hurry to get to the action that I never felt anything for these characters that I grew up loving, and that made the emotional stakes non-existent.

+ That laziness permeates every part of the movie, and the plot lurches along hitting all the points it needs to move the audience from one action sequence to the next. You'll meet the least surprising this-guy-is-definitely-going-to-be-evil rich philanthropist in the history of cinema.You'll get plot details spelled out in tired expositions because it's less effort to say everything instead of showing it. You'll wonder how the turtles suddenly have a tracking beacon or a GPS device that tells them exactly where they need to go next - it must be the same technology that lets them know that there's a five-minute countdown clock on a doomsday device without even seeing the computer. It's all so cheap and connect-the-dots feeling, and the film hurdles to the finale without having earned any of the lessons and payoffs that it drops in your lap.

+ Speaking of action, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has everything that you hated from Michael Bay's Tranformers series. Spastic tracking shots with too much happening on screen? Check. Gratuitous slow-motion used as a crutch for poorly shot sequences? Double check. A character screaming another character's name in the middle of a fight? OPTIMUS!!!!!

+ With a different writer, different director and a producer with a little more restraint, this might have been a decent movie. The much-maligned turtle redesign played better onscreen than I thought it would, and the few moments where the cinematography actually calms down and focus on them fighting had an impressive weight and impact. But alas, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and its inevitable sequels) sits next to Transformers in the Michael Bay hellscape of childhood desecration.