K-SCORE: 78
Director: Jonathan Liebesman, Dave Green
Writer: Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec, Evan Daugherty
Starring: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, David Fincher, Noel Fisher, Jeremy Howard, Pete Ploszek, Alan Ritchson, Whoopi Goldberg, Laura Linney, Stephen Amell, that guy from Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns, Tyler Perry’s For Better or Worse, Tyler Perry’s The Haves and The Have Nots, Tyler Perry’s Love Thy Neighbor, Tyler Perry’s If Loving You is Wrong and Gone Girl whose name I can never remember.
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“there’s something about this MadLibs-style concept...”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows are unquestionably mankind’s best attempt to turn this premise into a workable film franchise. Are they good? Not exactly. But there’s something about this MadLibs-style concept of throwing a bunch of adjectives in front of a random noun that is compelling. If, when I’d been a kid, it had been these CGI-live action hybrid films at my disposal instead of the 90s costumed monstrosities with Vanilla Ice, I’d have been a happier and more adoring fan. And I love turtles and ninjas so I’ve always been kind of on board. Mutants? All the better. The real problem is that they’re teenagers.
The plot of the first film, as I understand it, is: schizophrenic and orphan April O’neil is sent to a psyche ward to live out her days believing that her pet turtles have been mutated into ninja reincarnations of renaissance painters guided by their spiritual leader and sensei, a lab rat named for a small annoying shard of wood that lodges in skin and has to be removed with tweezers. Part of her delusion includes the morphing of a human ninja into a villain called Shredder who enslaves an army of men that embrace the banner of a human foot. In her mind, three of the turtles successfully prevent Shredder from releasing a virus that would exterminate everyone in New York, and one plus a cameraman do the second-most import job: telling her how hot she is. In Out of the Shadows, her delusions deepen to include a disembodied brain alien that shoves itself in and out of a robot body and threatens to obliterate the very same city by assembling a large metal sphere through a skybeam and portal from another dimension. The turtles and a hockey-player police-officer hybrid have to bypass a motorcycle-riding warthog and leather-jacket clad rhino to prevent disaster and again remind her how hot she is. Poor April is clearly beyond help and will die batshit insane and very much alone.
So the narrative is on-point. Of all the iterations of the premise, this series has the least annoying Raphael, but kind of an irritatingly arrogant Leo. The art for Kraang is perfect and the voice actor crushes every line. In the first film, one of the turtles throws a Foot Clan member into moving subway train which is fantastic, if for no other reason than it proves these films weren’t irreparably tainted by mother coalitions that didn’t like the notion of martial arts violence. Both films have too many characters and not nearly enough Tokka and Rahzar. Their Splinter is lame, and their Donatello is a genius who solves all plot problems with scientific knowledge and hastily assembled revolutionary technology and gets basically no credit for that. But hey, I don’t hate the others. I think I’m actually looking forward to the third entry in this series. Let’s kick shell! (Which is code for, let’s beat the terrible disease that has addled April’s mind into this dangerous paranoid phantasmagoria of Japanophilia and Amphibian fetishery.)
