Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The new reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might actually be worse than the Transformers movies. I’m not sure if it’s any worse on a filmmaking level (I’m not going to waste time examining the particulars of two awful films), but what the movie does to the legacy of the Turtles is much more painful. The myriad Transformers animated series were not very good, basically half-hour commercials for the toy line. Ninja Turtles was likewise a merchandizing cash cow, but it wasn’t just a blatant ploy to sell stuff to kids. The franchise actually began as a clever and popular comic book, and the media it spawned—cartoons, movies, highly acclaimed video games—had a certain fun quality for kids and adults. So it hurts more to see the series get the Michael Bay (mis)treatment.

Bay is only a producer here (with Jonathan Liebesman sitting in the director’s chair), but the movie’s still got all his trademarks: image oversaturation in every shot, incomprehensible CGI-packed action, headache-inducing rapid cuts and shaky cam, and, like Transformers, awful-looking digital characters. Yes, the Turtles up-close are as ugly as the Internet has complained, while their mentoring rat Splinter (voiced by Tony Shalhoub) looks like he was lifted from a 3D cartoon. This seems like a moot point to complain about, however, because even the characters who are real flesh and blood just become blurs in the muddled computerized mayhem of the action scenes, of which there are many.

Surprisingly, though, that’s not the worst thing. That would be the fact that for a while, the Turtles are barely in the movie, and the main character arc is not theirs. Instead, much of the time and story follows their reporter ally April O’Neil (Megan Fox), whose backstory gets retooled to give her a bigger part in their origin. This prevents the film from working as a dumb, turn-off-your-brain special effects movie, as the story portions are very boring and inane. Fox, at least, is no longer just a skimpily dressed object to leer at like in Transformers (in fact, the movie even lampoons this in one scene), but she is still not a very good actress.

This isn’t the only way the plot gets outsourced to the human characters. In spite of everything, the Turtles start to develop some humorous charm as characters in the second half. But, they have to compete with O’Neil’s cameraman (Will Arnett) for comic relief. Even worse, the classic villain Shredder (Tohoru Masamune) only exists as a digital effect to participate in fights scenes. Instead, the main bad guy as far as the plot goes is William Fichtner, playing one of the most generic supervillains ever. The result is that the main narrative conflict seems completely detached from the fighting, which drains any sort of dramatic depth or excitement from either. It’s like watching the story and exposition scenes of one movie and cutting in the action scenes from a completely different one.

There’s a few fleeting references to the franchise’s past that old fans will probably notice, but even these reek of pandering and insincerity. If they really respected the series and its fans, the filmmakers could have made a picture that honors its legacy while creatively reimagining it, rather than merely paying a little lip service while turning out such a noisy, ugly, stupid film. Even though the franchise has seen some very low points, none of them are as completely unappealing as this.