Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) - Review
Originally published October 2015Growing up, I was really into the Ninja Turtles. I loved the ‘80s cartoon series and the live-action movies in the ‘90s. I loved playing with all my Turtles toys and the video games. Obviously, the first one on the NES was too hard to be much fun, but I know that I beat Turtles in Time on the SNES at least 8 times. Even when I was into Power Ranges, I still liked the Ninja Turtles. I even liked the third live-action movie, as bad as it was. Of course, I grew out of it and moved on with my life to become an embittered young, old man.
So, maybe I've become too cynical to care, but when they announced that there was going to be a live-action TMNT movie remake, I just shrugged and said, "Of course there is." Despite my adoration for the Ninja Turtles back in my childhood, I don't share the remake animosity that people seem to have whenever another remake is announced of something that has significant nostalgic value. I'm not saying I want or like remakes, because I really don't. Hollywood and everyone else have already proven to me that they are incapable of delivering remakes on the level of The Thing by John Carpenter. They're simply trying to cash in on a name more than anything else, and they don't care what emotional or emotional attachment you have to the property, they're going to do what they want because they can. There's nothing you can do about it, other than not watch it.
Image: Paramount Pictures
But I did. I watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on my streaming service. Do I feel dirty for doing so? No. Do I feel like I'm only perpetuating the remake machine? Not really; they already greenlit a sequel within the first week of it being in theaters, so my watching it on Amazon and my subsequent review will have little impact. I was curious and I wanted an answer to the question: How bad is this movie?
Pros
The elevator scene.
Donatello and Michelangelo are consistent characters and feel like they have the appropriate attitudes, quips, and personalities to match what we expect of them.
Still turtles and not aliens, at least.
Leonardo feels like he's barely in the movie, which is nice for me because I never liked him.
Despite the poor CGI, the turtles all look distinct from one another and aren't just interchangeable.
Cons
Splinter. He's the most egregiously bad-looking creature of all the CGI in the film. He looks disgusting, and I happen to like rats.
Splinter. His personality doesn't really fit with the wise character he's supposed to be. Tony Shalhoub's voice doesn't really work for it either.
Splinter. He learned martial arts and ninjutsu from a 12-page pamphlet???
Shredder is a transformer.
We barely have a villain for this movie. In fact, no villain is revealed until the end of the 2nd act. As a result, Shredder, while supposedly "the master" comes across as a lackey to the scientist we already knew was a villain when we first saw him.
The CGI is bad.
The action sequences are boring thanks to the bland direction and crappy CGI.
Meghan Fox es no bueno.
Michael Bay-isms abound...
...Including misogyny!
A lot of dumb jokes that don't work or make sense.
Throwaway plot with a lot of filler in the beginning, then suddenly there is an ultimate threat.
Why is everyone so conveniently connected in superhero movies now? They did this in The Amazing Spider-Man too.
Splinter. Seriously. He looks like shit.
Additional Thoughts
So, from my long list of Cons and a short list of barely praiseworthy Pros, you can probably guess my overall impression of this film. It's bad. However, they did do some things right with it to make it better than the rest of the internet made it out to be. We'll get the positives in a moment, but first, let’s start with the elephant in the room.
I think one of the main reasons this movie is bad is the Michael Bay influence. He didn't direct it, but his stamp of quality is all over the movie. He's been snatching up the opportunity to produce or direct various franchises from the ‘80s like Transformers, Nightmare on Elm St., and Friday the 13th. The Turtles were next on his hit list, and he certainly has taken some liberties with the source material.
Let's start with Shredder. Formally everyone's favorite evil ninja who overused the word "cretin," Shredder in this movie is practically a transformer with the look and sound. He looks like the lovechild of a Predator and a robot. Plus, some of the noises he makes when floats through the air like a ballerina might as well have been cut right out of Megatron's soundbox.
Image: Paramount Pictures
The action is very Michael Bay too. A lot of the action is done with the shakey-cam technique to make the action seem faster and more frantic than it really is. It's all over the place, difficult to make out what exactly is going on, and the CGI is so unrealistically distasteful that I couldn't ever get past the thought of this all being done on a computer. It would have been better as a cartoon because then there'd be room for tension. The action is boring because there's no tension and it all just feels like a screensaver injected into the film.
Image: Paramount Pictures | This is exciting, right?
Bay's unfortunate qualities are present in the writing as well. Meghan Fox plays April O’ Banana Peel, but might as well be a pair of boobs and ass for how the movie would like to portray her. One of the criticisms that the Ninja Turtles series had was that April O’Neil was a damsel who always needed saving, mainly because she could never mind her own business being an ‘investigatory’ journalist. She was always getting in way over her head because she didn't really have a method of fighting off ninjas or mutants. Nonetheless, she wasn't a complete moron. In her own way, was trying to break through the glass ceiling and make a name for herself as an investigatory journalist, no matter how many friends she'd lose or people she'd leave broken and bloody along the way.
Meghan Fox's April, however, sets women back a great deal further than any of the portrayals in the live-action films or cartoons. For one thing, she's not a good reporter because her methods of investigation and questioning are quite weak and uninspired—she uses Google for most of her online research, rather than looking over the archived newspapers that might be available to her at her work. I realize Google is a powerful search engine, but there's more to solving mysteries than browsing Wikipedia. You'd think she'd have learned how to do real research with databases and checking your sources, having gone to college, or as she put it: "journalism school."
Image: Paramount Pictures
Unfortunately, her time in the unnamed "journalism school" couldn't help her common sense, either. She repeatedly does her best to sabotage herself and her career by trying to convince people, including her hard-ass boss whom everyone respects and fears, that there are mutant ninja turtles in New York. Somehow, she is shocked and mortified that, after acting like a crazy person with a crazy story, she loses her job when she tries to convince her boss a second time that there are mutant ninja turtles, with no evidence.
That's not sad or pathetic, that's just stupid. This April is stupid. She's even the dumb one responsible for alerting the villains of the turtles’ existence and the location of their hideout. According to the movie, the only time she was useful as a human being, was when she was a child and she rescued the turtles from a lab fire where the turtles were originally mutated because, of course, she knew them as a child. I don't want to even get into all the absurd coincidences of who knew April and who made the turtles. It's long, convoluted, and serves no real purpose in telling the story. All the coincidences could have been removed and the movie would be 99% the same.
There are even some rather creepy and tasteless lines about how "hot" Meghan Fox is, including an erection joke, from Michelangelo. There's no need for a line like that. It's dumb and it's weird. The fact that they're not even the same species only further illustrates the filmmakers' childish ignorance. When your main characters are a woman and giant turtles (which have completely different sex organs than humans), there's no reason for jokes like these. Keep the inter-species erotica to yourself, Bay and friends!
Despite Bay and his cronies seemingly doing their best to ruin the movie, the overall experience is still a more entertaining one than the third live-action movie from the ‘90s. It certainly does a better job of holding my attention. Even with the weird inter-species romance, Michelangelo seems to want, he still ends up being a fun character and the source of most of the comedy.
Image: Paramount Pictures
The turtles are relatively consistent in what I expect from their behavior, at least Mike and Donatello. Raphael gets the most screen time and the most to do of all of them, but his characteristics are slightly off. They got Raphael’s temper right, but he doesn't have the jokes to make him likable. He's the hothead without the sarcasm, which is a shame because they're all supposed to goofing around most of the time, excluding Leonardo who was always the tool leader. Lucky for me, I guess, he seems like he's almost absent from the movie. Of all the turtles, Leo barely feels like he's there. So if he's your favorite, tough luck. The other three, at least, are distinguishable from each other with recognizable styles and personalities. The design of the turtles, while ugly by many people's standards, seemed perfectly fine. I appreciated the added details to how each of them looked: Raph's beefy figure, Don's technical gadgetry and nerdy demeanor, and Mikey's playful smaller stature as the young runt turtle really make them stand out more from each other. Even the old live-action movies could have just traded one bandanna for another on each turtle and you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.
That's where the praise ends with design choices, though. The worst offender of this movie is the master rodent sensei. Splinter looks terrible. It's not just the fact that he's the ugliest rat I've seen on screen that wasn't in a horror film. His CGI is the worst of the bunch. The turtles look okay, and even Shredder looks okay in all his slow-mo computer-generated robot glory. Splinter looks ridiculous and gross.
Image: Paramount Pictures
The hair on his head, his skin texture, his weird prehensile tail that he seems to have, and his over-the-top martial arts look ridiculous. His martial arts, by the way, he somehow learned from reading a 12-page pamphlet, which must have also had an extensive appendix on Japanese history and culture since he seemed keen to adopt the style. Even his personality seems inconsistent or fake, as one might suspect from some stupid rodent that somehow became knowledgeable of Japanese culture from discarded pamphlets in a New York sewer. I don't think that a rat learning martial arts from watching its Japanese owner practice in front of him is believable by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly more acceptable than one that manages to learn martial arts, acquire historical Japanese clothing, and hair styles, and even learn Japanese folklore from books in a NY sewer.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Had I gone in with higher expectations, I may not have been willing to let the minor positives keep me from hating the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. However, I went into this expecting to turn it off almost immediately and I was able to sit through it to the end, which is good because then I was able to see the elevator scene. It's sad that such a small scene that has no action, in an action movie, ended up being the highlight, but whatever.
TL;DR: It sucks, but it's not as bad as the raging internet fans or Michael Bay haters would lead you to believe.