"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2014" PG 13
Apparently in 1999 there is a warp in space time where somehow April O'Niel was a little girl and her father some kind of scientist making the mutigen, an alien ooze, that leads to the creation of Splinter, Mikey, Raph, Donnie and Leo, the ninja turtles of the future. Somehow they are rescued and survive the destruction of the lab, while the paper thing villains plot their future revenge on tyhe city, based on hearsay from this evil businessman, who is from the get go evil.
Michael Bay did not direct this, and that's good. So it shows that the guy that did knew a little bit about the variations of the Eastman and Laird comics, even if he changed it considerably.
The movie plays a bit more like the 2003 reboot cartoon than it does the 1990 movie, but it is a remake of the 1990 movie, complete with a convoluted reason for why Shredder is now white, Splinter is now clearly played by a white guy, and the turtles are way too big and their magic blood enters into the story somehow. (It wasn't written by Kurtzman or Orci but by some of their allies).
The bad guys want the magic blood so that they can fire off a dirty bomb and then use it to cure everyone, making themselves rich from being called heroes. This idiotic plan would never work because they have no idea if it will even work on humans. It's that much of a mess.
It is no more silly though than in 2007 in the cartoon movie based on the 2003 cartoon in which they're older and this evil villain wants the turtle's powers to activate a stellar alignment whereas in that one stars apparently hang like planets just above the Earth. The turtles foil this plan also.
Speaking of dirty bombs, did the creators know the miscasting of April would create so much fervour? Was Megan Fox miscast? Yep. Why didn't they just let Gellar come back from the 2007 one? Who said April has to be hot? She wasn't on the show or in any of the cartoons. Megan does get to channel Shia at one point when she is running from some foot clan people and goes, 'No,no,no!', which is like weird.
Then again, in the Transformers cartoon, Carly wasn't hot. She was a nerd who could fix stuff. They've changed the Turtles a little too, like they tend to do.
Not sure if Johnny Knoxville was a good choice to play one of them, as he sounds a bit too unnatural.
Making Shredder actually Japanese would have not been insensitive to the Japanese. Why must Hollywood change things to make everyone white? They did this in Iron Man 3 because Mandarin could have been an offensive villain, but here Shredder is supposed to be a ninja from Japan! He's obviously not in this movie.
The fighting looks like Transformers and Shredder looks like Megatron with blades. If you want cool ninja moves, go see the original trilogy, 1990 to 1993. They were campy but at least they had heart. The first is the best.
The 2007 movie was almost as good as the second one, which was okay.
The third movie was not worth it, although after this, the third one might be considered a better film.
The new Turtle movie is not ultimately horrible and the critics have been merciless to it, when they know full well Bay produced it, so as one of his movies it rates alongside the first Transformers film, 2007, but is not as cool as the 2007 Ninja Turtles cartoon film.
Do not spend 12 bucks to see it in 3D. Just see it cheap. You will then have melted your brain for two hours.
Also the big lipped turtles are given such lips so that they can compensate for Megan's enhancement created lips, but there is no kissing in the movie. For shame.
And there is a fart joke, but it actually works in the context of the movie, but considering it comes off in a sewer, they could have just pretended it was a leak somewhere.
But even though Megan is miscast this is probably one of her best performances in a movie, as she no longer sports that spray on tan, and has learned how to act against made up characters and stand ins, and actors like Whoopie Goldberg. And when she was acting with the motion captured turtles she was also not bad. Lol. So basically she acted better this time with the human characters, not just made up ones. Lol.
Review by Adam Browne
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