Review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) by Ben L — 04 Mar 2015

While I did grow up watching some of the cartoons and playing with some of the toys, Ninja Turtles was never one of my favorite franchises. So when I heard that Michael Bay was going to produce a new film based on these guys I basically checked out and said "no thanks." However a friend liked the movie and suggested I give it a shot, so I borrowed his DVD. I must say I was surprised that there were some really good elements to this film. I thought the team that did the CGI was excellent because many of the fight scenes were entirely created in a computer, and they were beautifully choreographed. The director did a great job of using wider angles and mixing in some slow motion in order to capture the action. Most action scenes in modern movies are all close-up with a shaky cam and you can't follow the action, but this stuff was superb. I also thought that whoever punched up the script with jokes did a pretty good job. Michelangelo had some solid one-liners, and the interaction of the turtles had just the right amount of humor without making it farcical. The last thing I will point out on the positive side is Will Arnett. This movie needed about 10 times more Will Arnett because he is amazing, in fact I think the film would have been infinitely better if he was the main character and they just dropped April O'Neil. Every moment he was on screen was a win in my book, sadly there were a lot of moments he was nowhere to be found.

So it sounds like an overall high-quality production when I single out all those positives, but believe me when I say that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is not a good film. The first, very predictable, misstep was casting Megan Fox as April O'Neil and then making her the lead character in the film (she gets more screen-time than the turtles.) She cannot act, and every time they cut from a superb fight scene to show her face it just makes me cringe. Transformers justified using her for a couple of films because Michael Bay likes to dress her up in revealing outfits and grope her with the camera, but here she is dressed fairly modest throughout and that leaves her with nothing to fall back on since she lacks any acting ability. I also have a slight issue with Tony Shalhoub as the voice of Splinter. This is just a personal dilemma, because I love the actor and I am so familiar with his voice that I can't connect the words to the CGI character's mouth, I just keep waiting for Monk to walk in. One other minor nitpick that I've always had with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the fact that they try to make it so kid-friendly, but they load the screen with tons of swords and knives. So then they have to go out of their way in order to keep Leonardo from chopping off limbs and splattering blood everywhere. Even Shredder, who has 5000 knives on his ridiculous costume, simply knocks out Splinter in a fight and doesn't take the time to stab him while he's down.

But the real downfall of this film is that, in between the fight scenes and the jokes, the plot is absolutely atrocious. It's like someone took a piece of script-writing software, used a standard template, and then just started punching in names like "Leonardo" and "Shredder." Everything happens for the sake of convenience of the story, like Splinter saying "go get April, she is in danger now that she has seen you." Well, actually she wasn't in any danger, the writers just needed a reason to bring her to the turtle's lair because she was carrying a tracking device planted by the villain. Plus there's no subtlety to the story-telling, we actually have to be handed this 20-minute-long scene of exposition and flashbacks where Splinter details how they came to be. And, of course, for the sake of making a neat and tidy script they must have everything connect. So it just happened to be April's father who was running experiments on the turtles, and she just happens to be the only reporter in town who finds out about the turtles. It's bad enough that the script is so rote and predictable, but then they have to load it with completely illogical events and nonsensical behavior from the characters in order to make things reach the inevitable conclusion. So I will say that, if you want to shut off your brain completely (and I mean you have to be flat-lining an EEG,) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will provide some fun action and a few chuckles. However if you put even the slightest bit of thought into the story in this film it all falls apart.