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Parents need to know that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is an edgier live-action take on the legendary talking reptiles who emerge from the New York sewers to defend the city. The sometimes-explosive violence includes a lot of martial arts fighting, a flashback to a devastating fire, Turtles being tortured, and near deaths; in other words, it's too intense for younger fans of Turtle toys/merchandise, though it should be OK for tweens and up. And while this Michael Bay/Nickelodeon co-production doesn't have a lot of strong language (just insults like "stupid" and "idiot"), there are several references to April O'Neil's (Megan Fox) sexy body (she's called a "hot chick," one Turtle jokes that his "shell is tightening" around her, and her butt is stared at leeringly). The Turtles care about teamwork and brotherhood, and they work hard to defend the city against Shredder.
Cast: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, Johnny Knoxville, Tohoru Masamune, Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Shalhoub
Direction: Jonathan Liebesman
Genre: Action
Duration: 1 hour 37 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
Story: Shredder is the head of a shadowy crime gang called the Foot Clan. He intends to cause great harm to the residents of New York City by releasing a deadly toxin. It is only the turtles who, along with some help from a journalist, can save the day.
Review: April O'Neil (Fox, in fine form and shape) is a journalist with a TV channel who is frustrated with the fluff (or 'froth', as her somewhat lecherous cameraman played by Arnett, calls it) stories she covers. She wants to get her teeth into a real story and that falls into her lap one day when she witnesses a robbery at the docks apparently perpetrated by the Foot Clan. More importantly, she also witnesses a human-like creature appear out of nowhere and beat the living hell out of the criminals. Soon enough, O'Neil encounters all of them and realizes she has a huge story on her hands - a career changer that will give her just the kind of credibility she craves. But obviously her editor (Goldberg) isn't buying it and sacks her. She pursues the story anyways.
The turtles meanwhile - Donatello (Howard), Michelangelo (Fisher), Raphael (Ritchson) and Leonardo (Knoxville) - are martial arts masters trained by a giant rodent called Splinter (Shalhoub) and appropriately, reside in the sewers. O'Neil discovers (in what seems like a freakish coincidence) that these same were once her pets. Her dad was a scientist who did lab experiments on them, but an accident leads to their mutation. Tycoon Eric Sacks (Fichtner) backed the project. Now though, Sacks and Shredder (Masamune) plan to release a toxin in NY - a city that the turtles have sworn to protect.
Michael Bay has a producer co-credit in this reboot, which might explain the loud, frenetic action, bombast and ample camera time devoted to close shots of Fox's posterior. The turtle bonhomie has been suitably updated in keeping with the times - 'bro' is now 'brah' and they don't say 'yo' anymore. Thin plot aside, *TMNT* is peppered with just enough humour and maintains a strident pace throughout.
Arriving on the big screen this week courtesy of Nickelodeon and Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes production company and directed by Jonathan Liebesman (“Wrath of the Titans”), “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” – heretofore referred to as TMNT 2014 – brings back everyone’s favorite martial artist reptiles to the big screen in blockbuster style.
The film opens with a brief animated sequence that lays the scene for the adventure to come. In a nutshell, the city of New York is in the grip of a crime wave that police and public officials have proven powerless to stop, and Chanel 6 News reporter April O’Neil (Megan Fox) has a hunch that a group known as the Foot Clan is to blame. Unfortunately, neither April’s cameraman Vernon Fenwick (Will Arnett) nor her boss Bernadette Thomson (Whoopi Goldberg) shares her suspicions.
When April’s nose for news puts her on the trail of the Foot, she finds herself crossing paths with the last thing she ever thought to find: a quartet of 6-foot tall, crime-fighting turtles that – coincidentally – have a link to her past. When April’s colleagues dismiss her encounter as being the product of an overactive imagination, she seeks out the counsel of old family friend (and billionaire scientist) Eric Sacks (William Fichtner). As fate (and another coincidence!) would have it, Sacks knows more than he’s letting on, and it isn’t long before April and her new turtle friends are thrust headfirst into a plot that threatens the entire city.
Right off the bat, it’s safe to say that one’s ability to take a title like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” at face value depends either on one’s tolerance for the patently absurd or one’s pre-existing affinity for the characters. Indeed, it’s safe to say that the majority of people who’ll be turning out to see this film will rest firmly in the latter category (Heaven knows that this writer was one of those who looked forward to seeing their animated adventures every Friday night back in the early nineties).
Dreamed up in 1984 by Peter Eastman and Kevin Laird, the turtles were introduced as an intentionally ridiculous take on the grim n’ gritty comics in vogue at the time. Independently published, the little black and white comic book was a surprise hit, eventually leading the duo to quit their jobs to head up a business empire that has, thus far, yielded roughly half a dozen comic book series, three separate animated series (the latest of which is still ongoing), a bizarre two-episode animé miniseries from Japan, a live-action TV series (the less said, the better), three live action theatrical films released in the 90’s (to diminishing returns), and one tepidly-received computer-generated movie in 2007.
These days, everybody has their favorite versions; in much the same way that the first James Bond or Batman one sees tends to inform a person’s perception of those characters, the heroes in a half-shell have had so many iterations over the years that it’s tough to label any one version as being more “definitive” or “valid” than any other.
Perhaps in acknowledgment of this, “TMNT 2014” picks and chooses elements from versions past while putting its own spin on our mutant heroes’ origins. Where this one stumbles is its insistence on having everything from the villain’s plan to the turtles’ radioactive origins centering entirely around April O’Neal. While this may seem like an economical mode of storytelling in theory, it comes across onscreen as lazy and contrived, with the unfortunate overall effect of making the world the turtles inhabit very small indeed.
The narrative quibbles, however, pale in comparison to the lapses in logic the filmmakers expect the audience to accept, ranging from the inane (expert-level martial arts skills being acquired from a book) and the insane (main villain’s plan to release a biological agent in a city while he is still in the city) to the just plain stupid (fighting to secure a compound that can save the life of someone who has the compound in his blood the whole time anyway).
Much has been made of the manner in which the main characters have been overly-redesigned (you know you’re in trouble when the Krispy Kreme donut versions of your main characters are better-looking), but one thing that “TMNT 2014” does get right are the turtles’ individual personalities and the manner in which they interact with each other. Even if they’ve been re-imagined to be hulking (especially Raphael) monstrosities, these ARE the turtles you know and love: Leonardo leads, Donatello does machines, Raphael is cool (but rude), Michelangelo, of course, is the party dude. Curiously, the film takes no time to introduce these characteristics, much less their individual names, so if you’re going in without prior knowledge, you may find yourself lost for a stretch.
On the human side of the equation, the jury’s still out on whether it’s Megan Fox’s inherent lack of talent or her plastic surgery that renders her face inertly expressionless through a majority of the proceedings. Noted comedians Arnett and Goldberg are sadly wasted in minor roles, as is “SNL” alum Abby Elliot, in a cameo as April’s roommate.
Admittedly, the central conceit of the property has always been pretty bonkers, but something the filmmakers overcompensate on is their efforts to justify it, when they probably should directed their energy toward other areas (ie. cast, script, etc). Honestly, the film is at its most effective when it surrenders to the core concept’s goofy charms (as opposed to being embarrassed by it), and it is in those moments that “TMNT 2014” gets closest to actually being fun. Two sequences that stand out to show how much we’re missing are a physics-defying chase down the side of a snow-covered mountain that rivals “Desolation of Smaug’s” barrel scene for sheer giddy ridiculousness, and the final rooftop confrontation with the turtles’ perennial nemesis, The Shredder (who now resembles a Swiss Army knife by way of Megatron).
There is a moment near the beginning of the film where the turtles, fresh from their latest victory and silhouetted against the night sky, are running and leaping from rooftop to rooftop. It is at this moment that one can easily imagine their personal favorites filling out those free-running forms and, for the briefest of moments, imagine that they were in a better movie.
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