Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a 2014 film mercifully not directed by Michael Bay and starring Megan Fox, Will Arnett, and some voice actors.
When I heard ‘Ninja Turtles’ and ‘Michael Bay’ in the same sentence I wanted to crawl into a hole and hibernate for a thousand years. The Turtles getting the Transformers treatment? I figured it spelled death. But being an insane Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan, I went along to see it. And despite the 3D (3D makes me feel like my eyeballs are drunk but the rest of me is sober) I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie.
But let’s get the bad out of the way. Megan Fox as April O’Neal. No. Just…no. I know mental giants who can’t keep their hands off their dicks think she’s hot, but she’s just a nitwit. She brings nothing but a C-cup and her trademark lack of discernible talent to the role. And there’s a really nonsensical moment just after she first meets the Turtles where she doesn’t realise that four giant talking turtles wearing coloured bandannas are the same four turtles she raised in a genetics lab when she was a little girl (and painted the same coloured dots on their shells). She’s not even supposed to be playing an airhead in this movie. The moment is so badly written it’s cringe worthy. Nobody could be that stupid.
Anyway, aside from a few missteps like that the film is incredibly enjoyable. Internet fan boys moaned about the ‘look’ of the turtles here, but I think they’re fine. They are bulked up as per every other superhero movie out there at the moment, but they have distinct personalities and the voice acting is, with one exception, spot on.
The Shredder is also great (though I could have sworn it was Ken Watanabe when he first appears). He is suitably badass and his voice is really creepy.
I also like that this version omits the Casey Jones character, and instead the turtles fill the roles of New York’s ‘vigilantes’. One thing did bug me. Raphael was always my favourite. I identified with the ‘brooding loner’ thing. So I was a little disappointed that in this iteration he is actually the least interesting of the four. His voice also makes him sound like a huge black guy. It’s strangely out of place. It momentarily jarred me out of the film every time he spoke. Maybe it’s just that his Brooklyn wiseguy accent in the 1990 live action film was so perfect I was just expecting something different.
Anyway, it’s a pretty minor complaint. Leonardo and Michelangelo are probably the most fully realised of the bunch. Mikey steals every scene he’s in. Thankfully in this film he’s not relegated to the wisecracking moron role. While some of his jokes fall flat, most really appealed to my juvenile sense of humour and a scene in an elevator is worth the price of admission twice over.
Most of the fight scenes, although really well staged, are filmed in that Bourne Supremacy-jerky way that is off-putting enough in 2D, but this time had me wrenching the 3D glasses off intermittently and blinking like a mental patient to avoid a seizure. Thankfully the major set piece – a fight scene atop an out of control semitrailer hurtling down a mountainside - is superbly filmed and so exciting it had me bouncing in my seat like a hyperactive toddler.
And although the film ends with the expected ‘these days we don’t do movies, we do franchises’ moment (the Shredder is not really dead…wow, didn’t see that one coming), it’s forgivable because it’s such a short snippet of footage you could actually miss it, and the film does work as a standalone movie.
The 1990 live action film remains the best adaptation of the Laird/Eastman comic book foursome, but this film is brief, engaging, and humorous. It’s lots of fun. 100 minutes well wasted and 100 minutes I will gladly waste again.
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