'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' - Review

From the destroyer of classics (director Jonathan Liebesman) and destroyer of childhoods (producer Michael Bay) comes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a re-boot of the classic comic and cartoon series depicting four genetically mutated turtles who – under the names of the great renaissance artists – fight crime across New York City. Investigative reporter April O’Neill (Megan Fox) is hot on the heels of a rampant crime group when she encounters the eponymous heroes and is drawn into their efforts to save the city from the evil Shredder.

As with this week’s Annabelle, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is yet another film over which the producer’s fingerprints are smeared. Almost every single Bay-ism is present, with two noticeable absences which – at the risk of damning with faint praise – are sadly the only redeeming features of the film. The racism of previous years has vanished, and the running time is no longer the bloated 160 minutes of the recent Transformers outings, merely an hour-and-a-half romp.

Left behind is the horrendous product placement (the turtles’ cave in particular might as well be renamed the Toshiba store), un-necessary objectification (pausing in the heat of an action sequence to admire Megan Fox’s rear) and knuckle-chewingly unfunny comic relief. Liebesman by himself is hardly the best director under the sun but combined with Bay he’s managed to deliver something below even his usual standards.

Megan Fox is at least bearable for the opening twenty minutes before she gets almost entirely replaced by the turtles, but poor Will Arnett takes a nose-dive from his rib-tickling role as Batman in The Lego Movie to become one half of the ‘funny’ characters and does nothing but embarrass himself. Bay’s personal favourite William Fichtner is wasted yet again in another pointless crony role, and Whoopi Goldberg apparently hasn’t learned the lessons of previous anthropomorphic atrocity Theodore Rex. The turtles themselves just barely scrape through with personalities untarnished, save for Raphael and Leonardo who are almost indistinguishable in mannerisms and voice, while Michelangelo is given the other comic relief role (though I let that pass because that was one element not lost in translation from the original).

The plot is all over the place, with character motivations and ridiculous dialogue churned lazily out or flat-out stolen from other movies. You know a top-of-the-line modern blockbuster is scraping the barrel when the villain does what he does ‘for the money, of course!’ The action sequences are incomprehensible to the point that I almost developed a migraine trying to work out what was going on, and the whole movie is given a gritty, over-saturated aesthetic that removes any trace of the bright colours present in the originals. Alas, in the brief months since the veritable rainbow of colour that was The Amazing Spider-Man 2, studios have struggled to grasp that a comic-book movie works best with a comic-book palette.

Deprived of the bright colours and simple storytelling that made the original stories light, easily-accessible fun, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is ironically, an empty shell of a movie. With the hateful elements of Bay-produced fare surgically removed, it’s little more than lazy, bland action schlock that goes in one ear and out the other leaving only a mild headache in its wake.

1 star