Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Maybe it's me, but the Ninja Turtles just don't seem as weird as they used to be.  In this new reboot of the 30-year-old franchise, they're actually kind of dull.  They lack personality, and the one liners that the comic relief Turtle, Michelangelo, throws out aren't that funny.  You expect a lot of things from a movie centered around six foot tall turtles who battle evil, but you certainly don't expect indifference.  And that's really the main reaction that this movie got out of me.

Perhaps the Turtles are just characters of their own time period.  Back in the 80s, the characters seemed freaky and original, and the title instantly grabbed people's attention.  But now, we live in a world where a movie featuring a gun-toting raccoon can shatter box office records.  The Turtles are old hat.  This isn't even their first reboot, as there was an attempt to bring them back to the big screen with a CG cartoon just seven years ago.  I'm not sure how this attempt will go over.  I saw the film in a mostly crowded theater, and while there were some laughs, there was never a sense of excitement during any of the big action sequences.  The movie is a lot of CG effects and ear-shattering noise that leaves no impact upon the viewer.  In other words, it's not far removed from another toy-based franchise that Michael Bay (who produced this film) is involved in, Transformers.  At the very least, this Ninja Turtle movie has the good sense to not overstay its welcome, and wrap itself up in only 100 minutes or so.

One of the curious aspects of the screenplay is that it seems more interested in the Turtles' human friend, April O'Neil (Megan Fox), than in the Turtles themselves.  The movie's first half hour or so is devoted to April wanting to be taken seriously as a reporter, and cover a city-wide crime wave that is being instituted by a terrorist organization known as the Foot Clan.  But her boss (Whoopie Goldberg) keeps on assigning her to fluff pieces with a nerdy cameraman (Will Arnett) who holds a not-so-secret crush on her.  Late one night, April happens to stumble upon a Foot Clan crime in progress, only to see it get foiled by a mysterious and hulking vigilante who keeps himself in the shadows.  She follows up on the story on her own, and learns that there's not one vigilante, but four, and they're all Turtles who go by the names of Leonardo (Pete Ploszek, with voice by Johnny Knoxville), Raphael (Alan Richardson), Michelangelo (Noel Fisher), and Donatello (Jeremy Howard).

Turns out April has a past with these Turtles before they became mutant crime-fighters.  We learn that as a little girl, April's father was a scientist working on a top secret project with a businessman named Eric Sachs (William Fichtner).  The Turtles and a lab rat were part of an experiment, and the young April grew fond of the creatures.  When the lab mysteriously caught on fire and her father died, April gathered up the animals and led them to safety in the sewers.  It was down there that they grew into their current form because of the experiments that had been performed on them.  The rat, who goes by the name of Splinter (Danny Woodburn, with the voice of Tony Shalhoub), trained the Turtles in the art of the ninja, and now they fight against the Foot Clan, which is led by the mysterious arch villain Shredder (Tohoru Masamune), who likes to walk around in a robotic outfit that makes him look like a cross between a heavy metal album cover and Edward Scissorhands.

The Turtles themselves are brought to life by motion capture technology and special effects work by Industrial Light and Magic, which makes it all the more surprising that it's not very good.  The motion capture work is fine and all, but compared to the stuff we saw recently in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, there's no real "wow" factor.  The effects artists seem to be going for somewhat of a more human-like appearance to the Turtles, especially in their faces, but they still look like cartoon characters to me, and I never bought that they existed in this movie's real world.  I also couldn't believe the Turtles as characters, since they're not really given any individual personalities, or scenes where one particular Turtle gets to stand out.  They act as a group at all times, and do pretty much everything together at the exact same time.  Michelangelo gets to throw out a joke or two, but that's about as deep as these heroes get.

Not even the film's two major action sequences (one being an escape down a snow-covered mountain, the other being a climactic rooftop battle with the Shredder) manage to impress, because they are over-edited to the point that they feel like a Quick-Time event in a video game.  If I had to boil down my reaction to this Ninja Turtle film in a single word, it would be indifference.  I just never cared about what I was looking at.  There's no attempt to think outside of the box, or go one step beyond what we have seen in other recent big budget films.  The action and stunts are all stuff we've seen before, only this time they're being performed by CG humanoid Turtles that don't quite look right, despite the fact they obviously cost a ton of money.  You can see the money that the studio spent on this project in just about every frame, but all of it is used at the service of bland mediocrity.  It inspires no feelings within the viewer, other than maybe a few nostalgic pangs from those who grew up on the cartoons, comics or video games in the past.

This is one of those movies that manages to not be all that bad, while at the same time not managing to be good in any one way.  It will make its money, and it will be forgotten.  Will there be a sequel?  No doubt.  Hopefully they'll remember to put in some fun with the million dollar effects the next time around.

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