Movie Where Animals Are Acting Like Ninjas
Movie Where Animals Are Acting Like Ninjas
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
If zip else, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" reminds us that nostalgia is often used as a mandate for spectacularly lazy filmmaking. Yeah, I too loved the activity figures, video games, cartoons, and previous live-action commercials, I mean movies. But a "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" film that's trying this hard to pander to my babyhood love of pizza, karate, and talking animals shouldn't exist this imaginatively challenged. Nosotros're talking nearly a movie where exposition is dumped over viewers' heads in every other scene, activeness scenes are loud and uncoordinated, and every joke feels like it was scripted hastily in the vain hope that dial-upwardly writers would afterwards rewrite them. Instead of a fun and unchallenging limp downwards memory lane, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" is an energy-sapping exercise in futility that will leave you begging for less.
In "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," an inquisitive reporter discovers that you can make an inherently cool premise fifty-fifty more difficult-to-swallow with a convoluted backstory. Channel Six news anchor April O'Neil (Megan Fox) wants to be taken seriously as a journalist, and so she investigates a city-wide law-breaking wave involving gun-toting bad guys called the Foot Clan. She becomes even more than adamant to follow this story later on witnessing a mysterious vigilante cease a Foot robbery by chucking an industrial-sized shipping container at the bad guys. She then discovers that this offense-stopping hulk isn't working alone, and that both she and her ain tardily father have ties to this shadowy superhero that go as far back equally 1999. Then Apr spends the first one-half of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" establishing how she's related to the Ninja Turtles—disciplined Leonardo (voiced by Johnny Knoxville), hot-head Raphael (Alan Ritchson), goof-off Michelangelo (Noel Fisher), and geek Donatello (Jeremy Howard)—and soft-spoken (but totally unsuspicious!) philanthropist Eric Sacks (William Fichtner). Fifty minutes later, conflict ensues.
The fact that April'south search for answers comprises half of the motion picture's plot suggests that the moving-picture show's creative committee got so wrapped upwardly in using her to relate their origin story'southward plot that they forgot what viewers came to see. This is where the film's daze-and-awe maximalism (ie: everything bigger for no good reason) starts to brand a soul-burdensome kind of sense. You lot don't need to do much to impress viewers if you can immediately overwhelm them. So these Turtles are bullet-proof, vi-foot tall mountains of biceps and quads. Likewise, Foot leader Shredder (Tohoru Masamune) looks like a samurai-themed death metal band-leader with an Edward Scissorhands fetish. And Turtles leader Splinter (voiced by Tony Shalhoub) looks similar a cross between erstwhile man Groucho Marx and a freakshow pinhead...with a three-pronged Fu Manchu mustache. Thanks to the pic's ill-advised apply of post-converted 3D projection, you lot can get an upward-close expect at their freakish appearances.
Likewise, the film's activeness scenes are all so frenzied so that director Jonathan Liebesman ("Battle LA," "Wrath of the Titans") didn't waste time on choreography, humor, or annihilation more frantic motion. This is OK for an introductory fight scene, when April tin't clearly make out the Turtles beating up the Foot clan on a dark subway platform, only it doesn't wing during a downwards-hill car chase that involves a Humvee, rocket skateboard and electric grappling hook things. Characters are routinely shot out of focus and barely even covered competently, unceremoniously drifting in and out of the camera's frame.
The aforementioned is true of the film'southward winking jokes, joyless attempts to admit and muscle past the film'southward inherent ludicrousness. This isn't a new tactic, but in previous cartoons, Michelangelo, the grouping'south comic relief, was at least funny. Here, Mikey's best scene is the one where he leads the group in beatboxing before a climactic (ie: overstuffed, and noisy) battle. But Fisher's merely not naturally charismatic, and the material he'due south given to work with is a joke without a punchline: look, hip-hop turtles, and then much more wacky than martial creative person turtles! This is a gag for people who don't have the attending span for gags merely as "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" is nostalgia-bait for people that only need an alibi to regress. You lot already know whether or not you're going to like this film, and that's kind of the problem.
Simon Abrams
Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured inThe New York Times,Vanity Off-white,The Hamlet Vocalization, and elsewhere.
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)
101 minutes
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Movie Where Animals Are Acting Like Ninjas
Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-2014
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