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adamwatchesmovies · 6 months

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles marks the fifth time the heroes in a half shell appeared on the big screen. With this many strikes, I'm thinking it just can’t be done successfully. Certainly not as a live-action picture. This film’s characters are thin and uninteresting. Worse, there are so many of them they leave no room for any kind of clever plot. The attempts at humor fall flat and often make the film unintentionally creepy. Never mind the sometimes dodgy special effects. Combined together, they make Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles feel like a trip to the sewers.

Reporter April O’Neil (Megan Fox) witnesses a group of mysterious assailants fighting back against the Foot Clan, a gang of ninjas terrorizing New York. Michelangelo (voiced by Noel Fisher), Raphael (voiced by Alan Ritchson), Leonardo (voiced by Johnny Knoxville) and Donatello (voiced by Jeremy Howard) are mutated turtles who grew up beneath the city and were taught martial arts by their “father”, an equally mutated rat named Splinter (voiced by Tony Shalhoub). Only by working together can they thwart The Shredder (Tohoru Masamune) and his minions.

This film was doomed the moment executives decided to make it live-action. With all of the technology director Jonathan Liebesman had at his disposal, the heroes previously created via rubber suits in the '90s are now computer-generated 8-foot-tall masses of muscle that just don’t fit in the real world. I know the sewer-dwelling heroes have brought many people joy since their creation but let’s not kid ourselves. They were created to be ridiculous and by failing to embrace this, writers Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Evan Daugherty will have you rolling your eyes. It would be too cartoonish for the turtles to be randomly named after Italian Renaissance painters so April named them as a kid. She also gave them their love of pizza. It would be too silly for Splinter to have learned martial arts from a human master so instead, he picked up his techniques from dirty books he somehow knew how to read. The attempts to clean up and make the story more realistic don't work. We paid to go see a movie named Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We’re ready to suspend our disbelief and will gladly do so if the story is worth telling.

Even if you forgive the clumsy exposition, the characters are terribly written. All of the turtles are one-note. Raphael is angry and unwilling to follow the orders of his blue-bandanna-wearing brother, the one with the purple stuff is the nerdy one, and so on. If you didn't already know their names, you wouldn't bother to learn them. Then, we have Michaelangelo. Whenever he and April are on-screen together, he comments about how attractive she is. It’s supposed to be funny in a “he’s like a little kid crushing on the teacher” kind of way but you won’t laugh; instead, you’ll be scared we're about to witness a remake of Humanoids from the Deep. It isn’t just him; it’s also her useless co-star, played by Will Arnett. He’s 16 years older than she is. Seeing so many people slobbering at Megan Fox in this kind of movie makes you feel ill.

As bad as the heroes are, they're as complicated as a paper on astrophysics compared to the villains. The Shredder is a nothing of a character. He’s evil for evil’s sake, complete with a “let me kill my minions for kicks” attitude and an evil plan that makes NO SENSE. The only good decision made about the Turtles’ arch-enemy is to put him in an insanely futuristic suit of armor during the climax. Martial arts or not, there’s no way the character (who by my calculations, has to be at least 80) could stand a chance against the four giant, bullet-proof, radioactive reptiles with weapons. By making him a completely CG creation, it also helps make the carnage of their big fight somewhat believable.

I could go on and on about what doesn’t work in this film. Splinter’s creepy design and his unbelievable prehensible tail, the role William Fichtner’s Erick Sack’s plays in the story, the fact that draining a four-liter canister’s worth of blood from the turtles has no effect on them, April’s worthless reporting skills, the idea of an antidote to a virus that kills within minutes, the fact that - as a mutant - Splinter’s blood should contain the same mutagen as his children but for no explainable reason doesn’t, the fact that the turtles meant so much to April as a child she couldn’t even remember their names until she watched her own video diary, and the numerous plot holes throughout. Just about the only good thing about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a comedic scene during an elevator and a long chase down a mountainside that’s actually inspired. The rest is a big headache for anyone other than 12-year-olds who are hopped up on candy and soda. (June 4, 2021)

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