A movie about which the best thing that can be said is that it wasn’t as bad as expected, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is not offensively bad but it is not much good either. 

Taking a cue from the gross misunderstanding found in the Transformers movies, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles focuses on intrepid cub reporter April O’Neil (Megan Fox) as she tries to get her big break by blowing the lid off of the crime wave gripping the city and the mysterious vigilante that is believed to be fighting back. Her cameraman Vernon (Will Arnett) is too busy hitting on her and listening to ‘Careless Whisper’ to take her hunch seriously so she goes it alone and catches a glimpse of something large fighting back. No one listens to her but she manages to find herself in a hostage situation involving the Foot Clan criminal organization and this time she makes contact with a group of four mutated turtles who are also teenagers and ninjas. Recognizing the Renaissance inspired names Leonardo (Pete Ploszek, voiced by Johny Knoxville), Donatello ( Jeremy Howard), Michelangelo (Noel Fisher) and Raphael (Alan Ritchson) from the four turtles in her father’s lab from when she is a kid, she realizes that these turtles are one in the same and tie in to experiments her father was doing with Eric Sacks (William Fichtner), a wealthy CEO who is unfortunately in league with the leader of the Foot Clan, the Shredder (Tohoru Masamune). April and the Turtles team up to take the Foot down and all wackiness ensues.

Alright look, I am, like pretty much anyone of my age, a fan of the Turtles from way back. I loved the cartoon, read the comics and loved them even more and have been a fan ever since. So I go into this movie with a lot of background and a lot of preconceived notions about what this should be. I did my best trying to be objective about this version but there is always going to be expectation here because I have been a fan for so long. That being said, when I look at it from a standpoint of if this is the only version of the Turtles that has ever been, I still wouldn’t have liked it. Further, I have to acknowledge that I am really not the target audience here although to that point, the eight year old next to me in the TMNT t-shirt fell asleep so do with that what you will. 

Probably the biggest issue that this movie had is that it did not focus on the Turtles. They were essentially supporting characters with April as the main focus and the audience touch point. It isn’t that the Turtles are never in it or that they don’t have the right personalities but for a movie called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I would have liked to have more teenage mutant ninja turtles in it. I am kind of baffled as to why movies like this and Transformers think that the audience for these movies want to watch lame human characters do lame human shit while the awesome title characters are pushed to the background. The one commonality, of course, is Michael Bay’s involvement, here in a producer capacity, but after four Transformers movies about which people complained about this issue I would have thought he would have learned his lesson. Sadly, he did not and we are left with watching people do things that do nothing involving ninja fighting or wisecracks and that is just a waste of screen time that could be better spent on turtles kicking ninja ass. 

This also ties in with another huge problem in the film which is that there is so much extraneous plot going on that doesn’t add anything to the film or the established cannon and robs screen time from more worthy material. I am incensed that I don’t have Casey Jones here but have to sit through bullshit about Sacks being buddies with Peter Parker April O’Neil’s dad doing tests on turtles and a rat in a lab and that they were April’s pets…any monologue Sacks has about training in Japan with his sensei and just basically anything involving Sacks. The Shredder is a fine villain on his own. He is a badass ninja in a costume with metal blades all over and runs a secret clan of ninjas, why do we need the head of a tech corporation acting as his front man? Is it a question of racist whitewashing? I am not sure but it sucks and it takes away from other areas of the turtles cannon that would have been better.

I don’t have a problem with remakes and reboots when they bring something new and worthwhile to the table but here every new idea and deviation that they make weakens the story and characters. I get that having Splinter learning ninjitsu by watching Homoto Yoshi train and then practicing in his cage is silly as all hell and that maybe having the turtles origin parallel Daredevil’s origin is probably not a great idea but having Splinter find a book on ninjitsu in the sewer and then training the turtles into function ninjas adds insult to injury. The audience has already suspended a metric ton of disbelief here and this change makes it a bit too much to bear. The addition of Sacks complicates things way more than it should and again takes away from much cooler things that could be happening hopefully that include the characters the movie is named after in the first place. I realize this probably sounds like bitter nitpicking but the story being told is not a very good one and the added and altered elements add nothing positive to the movie. 

What is kind of weird about this movie is that going in I expected it to be overly silly and goofy but it really isn’t, at least not as much as it seemed liked before hand. Further, contrary to rumors before hand, Eric Sacks is not Shredder and the two are different characters. The designs of the turtles with their weird lips and hulking forms is not as awful in motion as I thought they would be and frankly once you get used to it, it really doesn’t look bad and the effects were not terrible. Pretty much all of the things I thought I would hate about this either turned out not to be a part of the film or weren’t bad after all. So that is nice.

The performances were alright for what they were and Megan Fox wasn’t terrible as April although I feel like there were plenty of other actors who could have done it better. William Ficthner is a favorite of mine and despite his character being useless, he did the best job he could. Likewise with Will Arnett, he didn’t have much to do but he did what he had pretty well. 

The Turtles themselves were all well performed and the posture, movement and vocal performances were generally very good and matched the turtles well enough. I felt like Leonardo got a bit of the short shrift but then again all the turtles were backseated in this film. I will ignore that Michelangelo is mega creepy toward April when I say that Noel Fisher, in particular, shines here. There are moments with the turtles in which there are flashes of magic and shows why the turtles have been so well loved for so long but then the movie switches focus to more shit that doesn’t matter. It is really too bad.

Conclusion [4.5 out of 10]

It took me several days to process how I felt about this movie and coming up with a score was difficult because it isn’t offensively bad but it is just bad.  It doesn’t fall into good bad territory either so you are left with a movie that is just an inferior version of something done much better several times in several different mediums. If you can choose between the cartoons, comics and previous live action films I am hard pressed to imagine you would choose this over any of those. Except maybe the Next Mutation and the goddamn musical tour. I would rather watch this over and over than watch any of those. Still, it is boring, without much charm and doesn’t have enough Turtles. I can’t really recommend this to anyone unless you are taking kids and even then, that kid next to me was out like a light so the whole thing is  a sketchy proposition. It is too bad too. I would have really liked a good turtles movie.