How about some faint praise to start things off? This new Ninja Turtles movie isn't horrible. It's watchable, and has a few moments of fun. Megan Fox doesn't give a distractedly bad performance and there's not a lot of shaky-cam in the action scenes. And.....that's it. Honestly, I'm sure that's more than many of you reading this expected the movie to have, but I still wish there had been so much more, mainly because the rest of the movie is a forgettable mess. Much of the movies flaws come from the screenplay (written by three different guys), which feels like they have to give the turtles tons of mythology in order to make them interesting. Instead of, y'know, giving the turtles themselves some kind of interesting personality.
Credit where credit is due, they've actually come up with a cool new origin story for the turtles and Splinter. The emphasis on father figures would be more effective if I cared about any of these characters, but at least they tried. The trouble is they drag this origin stuff out for so long, I found myself just not caring anymore by the end of it all. Much of the film is focused on Megan Fox's April O'Neil, who at least gets to express more emotions than her character in Transformers. She's not great or anything, and good lord, some of her moments here make Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker look like Daniel Day-Lewis in terms of emotional range, but at least she doesn't crater the movie with her performance.
We have to spend much of the movie with April, as she slowly, slowly (did I mention slowly?) discovers the turtles and where they come from. None of it's very engaging, and it feels like time that should be spent on developing the turtles as actual characters. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are just a four bursts of hyperactive energy that yell, push, shove and sell toys. They have two word personalities ("tough guy", "smart guy", "funny guy", "leader guy") but we're not really given any reason to care about them. I was especially disappointed in Leonardo, who just doesn't have anything really interesting to do or say despite being the crux of many of the films emotional moments. He's also voiced by Johnny Knoxville for some reason, which is really just bizarre because all the other turtles get be played by the guys who did motion-capture for them on set. Yet, for some reason, the guy who mo-capped Leonardo is the only one who got dubbed. Feels a bit disrespectful. Oh, also, there's Michelangelo. He's funny at first (I actually laughed out loud at his obsession with a video of a cat playing chopsticks with chopsticks), but his recurring shtick of being in love with April gets old fast.
By the time we enter the third act, things have just sort of spiraled out into pure incoherence, especially the antagonists evil plan that deserves an award for Most Idiotic Villain Plan in history. Again, props have to be acknowledged for some memorable moments involving the turtles as they face off against Foot Clan thugs in a snowy setting, but frankly, after hearing other people say how a sequence with the Turtles facing off against their foes on a snowy mountain was the "highlight" of the film, the set piece still fell flat for me. I just could care less about these four walking talking toy commercials, even if Will Arnett is charmingly rubbing shoulders with them. Considering the director of this thing is Johnathan Liebesman, whose previous works are Wrath of The Titans and Battle: LA, and the whole production is intended to mirror Michael Bays abysmal Transformers movies, I feel almost grateful this thing isn't utter garbage. But it isn't too far off, and sadly, this Ninja Turtles adventure does not get a hearty cowabunga from me.
Oh, and to the guys who designed Splinter in this movie...YOU MONSTERS!!! That guy looks terrifying!! why does he have rat eyes and not more humanlike pupils???? Why does he look so terrifying and realistic??? Oh God, the nightmares....
No comments:
Post a Comment