Review of TMNT (2007) by Gimly M — 25 Nov 2013

What an utterly ridiculous, poorly made and unnecessary film TMNT was!

Above everything else, was the dishearteningly overwhelming lack of originality. The premise has been repeated more times than a photo of a girl in high-waisted denim shorts on Tumblr.

Not to mention the fact that they make the assumption you know exactly what's going on with the Turtles and their backstories and their friends and their relationships and their characteristics and their universe, and then go on to complete throw out their source material anyway, and come up with a new bad guy and make the old bad guys good? I've had an on-again-off-again relationship with Turtles for the better part of my entire life and even I thought it was convoluted and ridiculous.

Fuck, at least it wasn't a remake, they've got that going for them. But it's all so inanely serious that TMNT loses the self-referential humour and parody that it always sought to emulate. And let's be honest, something with a title like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" with "Foot Ninjas" and "Secret Ooze" is not really the sort of thing you'd think you'd be meant to take seriously.

The animation itself is just woeful Far below the standards we would come to expect of high budget movies even in 2000, let alone 2007. There's some monsters that look okay (eg. above), but we know virtually nothing about them, and their totally indistinguishable from the antagonist's henchmen.

It's a bad Super Hero movie, a bad Sci-Fi, a bad Kids film, a bad action, it basically has no place in the cinematic world. The characters who are supposed to be the more moral of the bunch are nothing but hypocritical, at least Raphael acknowledges he's an asshole, and he does very well at it.

The film wrestles to notch some love and money back into the franchise, but instead flops down nice and neatly into the category of Astro Boy (in fact, there's a ridiculous amount of similarities between the two) as a failure that's best forgotten by the majority, but even slightly worse. I'm sure some will get enjoyment out of the film, but I see difficulties in it really appealing to any but the simplest of tastes.

21%.

-Gimly.