Review #984: 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' (2014)

Not content with taking one beloved 80's cartoon (Transformers) and draining it of all personality and the sort of charm that made it so appealing to begin with, Michael Bay - here on production duties - has now made a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie simply because he could. In his hands, the title seems less the quirky advert for the cartoons bat-shit crazy mythology than a series of series of keywords input by the type of audience it's attempting to attract. It retains enough of the back-story originally created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird to justify calling itself a Turtles movie, but ultimately panders to a teenage audience too young to know any better.

Young New York reporter April O'Neil (Megan Fox) is becoming frustrated at her stations insistence that she cover tedious news stories while a terrorist organisation named the Foot Clan instigate a crime wave throughout the city. During a couple of close encounters with the Clan, in which she happens to be at the right place at the right time, April spies a quartet of huge vigilantes who save the day before disappearing into the night. One night, she follows the trail and discovers that the vigilantes are four 6-foot anthropomorphic ninja turtles named Leonardo (Pete Ploszek with Johnny Knoxville's voice), Raphael (Alan Ritchson), Donatello (Jeremy Howard) and Michelangelo (Noel Fisher).

William Fichtner plays a corrupt CEO named Eric Stacks, whose big plan is to infect the city with a virus only he and his company have the vaccine for. It's a wonder why Stacks wasn't just written as the big bad rather than having him report to Shredder (Tohoru Masamune), a huge Japanese warrior with an impressive set of kitchen knives. Yet since Marvel established the potential for universe building and the money to be made from it, an increasingly common blockbuster trait is sacrificing a stand-alone story for the sake of establishing a franchise. With Ninja Turtles, we get a half-baked plot that simply teases how exciting things could get, without really delivering in the movie we are actually watching. Only a shell-surf down a snowy mountain that leaves the law of physics in its wake really excites.

The film isn't quite as awful as I'm perhaps making it out to be, but it's let down by being so shockingly mediocre. The main positives are the turtles themselves. While being underused (Leonardo barely gets a look in), they are stunningly rendered. Far more grotesque creations than those of the cartoon, they are almost completely life-like, all bulging muscles and tatty clothes. Unlike the indistinguishable hunks of metal of Transformers, you can also actually tell them apart (although their character development doesn't reach beyond 'leader', 'hard-ass', 'tech-genius' and 'loose-cannon'). In between the CGI fist-fights is when the film really suffers. Bay's influence can be felt throughout, no more than the cutesy fast-talk bickering between April and her horny partner Vernon (Will Arnett) who share zero chemistry and are lumbered with some cringe-worth one-liners. Despite all of this, the world-building obviously worked, with the sequel due to arrive later this year.


Directed by: Jonathan Liebesman
Starring: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, Pete Ploszek, Johnny Knoxville, Jeremy Howard, Tony Shalhoub
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie