This latest attempt of a feature Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film sees the Turtles recreated with performance capture in a live action production. It stars Megan Fox (Transformers), Will Arnett (The LEGO Movie), William Fichtner (Armageddon) and finally Alan Richtson, Noel Fisher, Pete Ploszek and Jeremy Howard all as the Turtles.
It’s quite obvious we all wanted a new TMNT film… right? Well, whether you like it or not, we got one. This time Shredder teams up with a scientist called Erick Sacks to release a poisonous gas in New York. It’s up to our favourite Ninja Turtles to stop them. The film starts off following reporter April O’Neil played by Megan Fox, who is functional. She’s not great and not bad, but with a script like this there’s not much to work with. We’ll get more into that later. April O’Neil is trying to become a more serious reporter and in doing this she accidentally encounters the Turtles.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YpS9zIagdk&w=560&h=315]
Now let’s start of with the stars of the show, the Ninja Turtles themselves. The leader Leonardo is pretty bland; he’s just a typical leader with no real depth – which is the same for all of them. They fit their specific roles; Raphael is tough; Donatello is smart; Michelangelo is the funny one. Surprisingly, he’s actually hilarious and Noel Fisher does a great job of standing out in a film that is largely poor. His humour is smart and modern, which may not stand the test of time but at least it’s funny for now. You can’t help but compare the portrayal of Shredder in this film to the previous TMNT films. He’s a flat villain, just bad for the sake of being bad, as well as his robotic suit which is a ridiculous amount of knives trapped to some metal. It’s pretty laughable actually.
Now we get into the script, in which the dialogue is horrible and insultingly simple. Anyone could have written this film; it seems like someone at Nickelodeon just said “Hey you! Write a TMNT script!” to the cleaner. This becomes very apparent with a monologue scene from Raphael towards the end. Nothing in the monologue actually happens on screen, as though his character development started before the movie did. The direction for this movie isn’t bad, however, and the mountain scene is very well crafted. The visual effects used for the Ninja Turtles are stylish and professional, a redeeming factor for sure, despite the last act of the film basically being The Amazing Spider-Man… Seriously though? Tower? Gas? New York?
While this may seem like a bad review, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is satisfactory and delivers fun and excitement to its target audience – kids under 13? However if you have the option to see any other film, you’d definitely be better served.
Words by Eddie Snafu