2014 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Alternate Title - TMNT Save Gotham
PG13 - 101 minutes.
Director - Jonathan Liebesman
Stars - Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, CGI monsters.
Huge fan of the cartoon, toys and movies as a kid. Although I hated the third movie due to the pointless time travel and it killed my passion for all things turtle. So, when I heard this movie was coming out I had two feelings; one of "stop remaking sacred shit" and another of nostalgia. I completely skipped the TMNT CGI nightmare from 2007 so I assumed I would skip this one as well. I seriously avoided everything about this movie. I didn't look it up on IMDb (which is rare), I didn't watch a trailer and I didn't ask anyone how they liked it if I knew they had already seen it. I seriously didn't give a shit about it. Now that that's out of the way; I thought Michael Bay directed it. Like I said, I didn't look it up but I heard his name and assumed he was directing. With that being said, I watched the whole movie and didn't realize until the end credits that it wasn't Michael Bay in the director's chair. So, that means the movie actually won me over despite my anti-Michael Bay stance in life. It wasn't amazing by any means but it was enjoyable.
Pros:
- The CGI turtles look and sound good. Nothing about them bothered me. When April first meets Splinter, the eyelines don't match up but it was momentary. They sound just like they always have. Don is a dork, Leo sounds like and is the leader, Mike is a surfer dude that serves as comedic relief and Raph is and has always been just an Italian gangster from Brooklyn.
- It's a well made movie. Coming from a directing standpoint, it's well done.
Cons:
- The story is fairly terrible.
- Everything is convenient. April just happened to be the one that took care of and named the turtles when she was a teenager. I hate when huge movies set in major cities have a convenient plot that happens to completely revolve around a half dozen characters. In real life people play minor parts and discover shit as life unfolds. In this movie, April just happens to know everything already, but conveniently forgot until she sees the turtles all grown up. I know it was a comic reference but why make her the one that named them? I had zero problem with her just being a hard-edged news journalist out to make a name for herself. I didn't need to have her be a part of the backstory. It's a huge city with lots of people that aren't our main characters.
- Evil....just cause. The plot is that Sacks wants to release a virus on NYC and then supply the antidote to the government so he can be even more filthy rich. He's already very rich. He has a huge house in the mountains that for some reason overlook NYC in this movie. Shredder is his master for some reason. This is again for some reason told to us passingly via a conversation between April and Sacks. It's all too obvious that he's talking about Shredder.
- Why is the largest mountain in the world located in NYC in this movie?
- Megan Fox is the worst actress in the world. She has Eli Manning disease in this movie. She cannot breathe out of her nose whatsoever. I was getting so angry watching that mouth-breathing dummy as she casually watched the turtles and Splinter get demolished by the Foot Clan and Shredder. She didn't react to anything because everything was CG. She managed to breathe over the entire hip-hop soundtrack to this movie.
- It's just fucking lazy writing. Want to know how the turtles become ninjas? Splinter found a book in the sewer and said, "Why the fuck not." That's it. He trained them to become ninja masters because they were bored and wanted to see the outside world.
- Splinter looks like a slimy turd. He's gross looking and has huge, bulging eyes. It's distracting as all hell during close-ups of him.
Overall, despite my list of cons heavily outweighing the pros list; I actually enjoyed the movie. It was decent. It has brutal violence for a kid's movie. The world the turtles inhabit got Nolan's Gotham treatment. It's a brutal world and the Foot Clan aren't just clumsy criminals. They're fucking terrorists that act more like they belong on The Dark Knight alongside the Joker than in a kid's movie.
I gave it a 6/10.