Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

by Trevor Kirkendall

★★

Much like every other guy my age, I was a huge fan of the Ninja Turtles when I was a kid. Obsessed would be a better word for it. I couldn’t get enough of them. Raphael was my favorite. And that was when I was at an age where I wasn’t fully aware of the concept of fictitious characters. They seemed very real to me. Especially in their first movie in 1990, and then when we saw them live and in concert around the same time (yes, I did actually go to that – great fun as a kid but incredibly ludicrous now looking back on it). Of course, the whole fad is a little crazy from the point of view of a 31 year old, but whenever I see the Turtles, it brings a bit of nostalgia back.

Such is the purpose of the new version of these Turtles in the Michael Bay-produced and Jonathan Liebesman directed “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” This film attempts to rewrite the origin story quite a bit, which I won’t go into here as I guess it could be considered a spoiler. There’s April O’Neil (Megan Fox), a young reporter for New York City’s Channel 6 News. She and her cameraman Vernon Fenwick (Will Arnett) are assigned to do the fun stories around town, but April wants to be taken seriously in the eyes of her boss Bernadette Thompson (Whoppi Goldberg). She’s also driven to live up to the her expectations of her late father, who died a long time ago working alongside New York’s wealthiest and most influential businessman Eric Sacks (William Fichtner).

Recently, a crime wave has taken over the city at the hands of what appears to be some kind of unstoppable terrorist organization called the Foot Clan. They’re lead by a martial arts master known as Shredder (Tohoru Masamune) and his right hand woman Karai (Minae Noji). April witnesses a Foot Clan robbery thwarted by our heroes and comes face to face with them: the four brother turtles Leonardo (Pete Ploszek, voiced by Johnny Knoxville), Donatello (Jeremy Howard), Michelangelo (Noel Fisher), and Raphael (Alan Ritchson). They also introduce her to their master, a rat named Splinter (Danny Woodburn, voiced by Tony Shalhoub). With them, she learns the true plan of the Shredder and the Foot Clan and has to help the Turtles stop them before it destroys the entire city.

At its core, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” is pretty typical of the old cartoon series in the late 80s/early 90s. Outside of the tweaked origin story, the film does have that fun feel of cartoon. What it lacks is a focused story and any kind of set up and development for those in the audience who might not have been as obsessed with the Turtles as people like me.

If you weren’t a fan of the Turtles in the late 80s/early 90s, this film isn’t for you at all. You’ll be lost because the film does nothing to set up these characters. It’s supposed to be an origin story (first movie in what will more than likely continue to be an ongoing franchise). The four turtles are mostly over inflated caricatures of their personalities from the original series, which I actually found to be very annoying (especially Donatello – poor guy). The only person here who’s given the slightest bit of character development in April, and Megan Fox (being the terrible actress that she is) throws it all out the window.

Sure, it’s a Turtles movie. I get that. It’s not supposed to be award-winning material. I never expected it to be. But what I do expect – and what all audiences should demand – is to not be strung along from one action sequence to the next with little or no story tying everything together. “Ninja Turtles” feels like it was written by numerous writers (and it was: Josh Appelbaum & Andre Nemec and Evan Daugherty) who pulled out a couple of the oldest superhero storylines from their back pockets. Then they tied everything together with ridiculous action sequences that are a little hard to follow.

The growing trend with these superhero movies is to make them less of fantasy, and more likely to occur in the real world. If these people with super powers really existed, this is how it would play out. The same idea is applied here but to little success. Here we have the Turtles fighting the Shredder, which is typical of the cartoon, but unrealistic in a real world setting. So a shady businessman has to be created to help tie the fantasy world into the real world. This gives us separate villains and separate heroes. This leads to lack of focus, which ultimately leads to mass boredom from viewers. 

The film would have been much better if it was the Turtles vs. Shredder and April O’Neil with the assist, just like the series. Instead, we are given a new origin story that attempts to make the Turtles more realistic and plausible heroes in the real world. But they’re mutated turtles who are also teenage ninjas. They don’t have to fit in a real world setting. Batman works in the real world. I can even accept Iron Man as a real world character too. But the Turtles? This is pure fantasy and that’s the way it needs to stay. Too be fair, this isn’t the worst incarnation of the Turtles I’ve seen. Michael Bay didn’t absolutely destroy these characters like we all thought he would, but he didn’t do them any justice either. Better luck next time.