To say that the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie is bad is an oversimplification. Looked at strictly as a summer action movie, it’s pretty standard and falls in the middle of the pack. A handful of action sequences spaced out by exposition and bare-bones characterization. It’s by-the-book-action. And that’s why it fails.
The movie takes a premise and characters that are inherently silly and absurd and forgets to have fun with it. It comes across as an assembly line production, made by people just doing a job as opposed to people who care at all about the characters they are trying to bring to life.
All the things that could make this a more unique movie are replaced by generic stand-ins. Shredder is less blood-thirsty gang leader and more hired help for bland villain William Fichtner, and his bland scheme to make bland money. Shredder’s armor is also given to him by Fichtner, and instead of making him an intimidating ninja warrior, he becomes an Iron Man/Transformer, because that’s what the kids are into these days.
Even the Foot Soldiers, instead of being Shredder’s ninja army, are armed thugs, lugging around assault rifles like terrorists. I’m gonna be honest, this pissed me off more than almost anything else in the movie. The Foot are a fantastic force for the Turtles to go up against in almost every other iteration of the franchise. They are an army of ninjas who have been trained in the same arts as our heroes in a half-shell. It makes for amazing fight sequences. Replacing them with the kind of hired henchmen you could find in just about any other movie would be like someone saying, “Yeah, Superman is cool, but what if we made him a normal person?”
This problem extends to the Turtles themselves. The best versions of TMNT have realized that, with such a ridiculous premise, we need to get to know and care about the Turtles as characters (this is something the new cartoon on Nickelodeon excels at). By contrast, the new movie doesn’t slow down enough for us to understand each Turtle beyond their one designated trait. Leonardo is the leader. Donatello is the techie. Raphael is a hothead. Michelangelo is goofy.
Granted, these are the established personalities of each, but better versions have always found ways to build off those traits to create more nuanced characters (again, see the new Nickelodeon cartoon. It’s awesome.) But this movie couldn’t give two shits, because that would take work and effort.
In fact, for much of the movie, the Turtles are just interchangeable protagonists. You could, for example, replace Raphael with the Hulk and much of the film would be unchanged. At one point Raphael is literally knocking bad guys out of his way as if they were rag dolls just like the Hulk would do. No ninjitsu, just bullet-resistant brute strength. There’s almost no point in even having this be a Ninja Turtle movie. There are a few token attempts, like an impromptu jam as the Turtles ride in an elevator towards the end of the movie, but it comes so late in the game and out of nowhere that it feels less like an example of how these characters behave and more like an afterthought inserted to pad out the run time.
The supporting cast doesn’t fare any better. April O’Neil is essentially just there to be objectified (the fact that Megan Fox was cast should make that abundantly clear). Her connection to the Turtles and plot is based on her relation to her father, who was working with Fichtner’s charcter, as opposed to having anything to offer herself. Splinter, for the first time in the franchise’s history, has no direct Japanese lineage or connection. He is literally just a lab rat before being mutated, and learns ninjitsu from a book he finds in the sewer. This doesn’t stop him from using an Asian accent though, as well as taking a distinctly Asian-looking hair style and outfit, which makes this version of the character a bit of a racist.
The good news, I guess, is that despite everything the new movie is only the third-worst thing to ever come out of the Ninja Turtles franchise. The top spots still belong to the Coming Out Of Their Shells rock tour, and the acid trip that was Saban’s Ninja Turtle reboot. And it’s unfortunate, because there are a few brief moments where the new film actually becomes enjoyable. The centerpiece action sequence featuring a car chase down the snowy slopes of a mountain is a nifty set piece, and at one point three of the Turtles get shot up with adrenaline providing the only genuine laugh the movie got from me. It was the kind of fun I would expect from a Ninja Turtle adaptation, and it really is a shame the filmmakers didn’t let more of that shine through.
