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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The general tenor of this Michael Bay-produced reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is summed up in Megan Fox's dismissal of the idea that these fighting reptiles might be aliens: 'No, no, that would be stupid' she explains, and then the film takes a rare breath to let the line land. It's a joke, sort of, though it's a joke you'd really only get if you're the type of obsessive or nostalgia-ist who has been following this production saga long enough to remember that Bay once mused about making the turtles extraterrestrials, at least until he was shouted down by franchise purists.

That little exchange tells us that the film is going to be meek enough to not rock any boats, but also crafted more to play off your memories than stand on its own. Take the Turtles' personalities, documented in song as leads (Leonardo), does machines (Donatello), cool but crude (Raphael) and party dude (Michaelangelo): those are there, but without any thought to, I don't know, why or how. They're just tics, shades to fill in the one-liner generator, no more revealing of the Turtles than their colour-coded masks. Say what you will about the rubber-suited '90s films, at least they explored the dynamic a little.

Nothing like that can get in the way of the action, served up at a breakneck pace that is the closest thing the movie has to a saving grace. Because nothing can start rolling without a push, we're introduced to the turtles by April O'Neill (Megan Fox, giving a performance that's emphatically present), who meets them as they're beating up members of the Foot Clan, who we're told are terrorizing the city. Given more of a connection to the foursome than the usual backstory, she's quickly helping them move up the chain to Shredder and an oily businessman (William Fichtner), who is masterminding some dastardly plot, as every oily businessman who seems at first to be helping is wont to do.

Points in place, the movie moves to crash through them as quickly as possible. There are some suitably cartoon-y set pieces, most notably an inexplicably snowy chase down a mountain, shot with enough energy to almost make you forget that everyone here has the depth of a plastic action figure. The CGI turtles are as deep as they're required to be, although in the slightly-less-frantic action sequences, such as their climactic fight with Shredder, there is an airiness to the graphics that makes everything look like an arcade fighting game, a completely ungrounded, disembodied quality that at least matches the meaningless of the actual encounter. I mean, it happens because they need a final fight, but Shredder here is less menacing nemesis than high-tech Ginsu set, given literally nothing to do other than fight turtles at appointed times.

This being a Bay production (Jonathan Liebsman is technically the director, but it's easy to tell who his influences are), it might actually be best they don't try too hard to actually set up much in the way of personality: What passes for depth in the human characters is mostly Will Arnett as a greasy cameraman ogling Fox in that sniggering, entitled meathead way that is a staple of Bay-ian convention. This slobbering even manages to bleeds over into Michaelangelo, interspecies erotic banter apparently one of the ways you define 'party dude.'

Still, it would have been nice to have something to try to hold on to while the Turtles barrel from one fight to another. Mutant ninjas are fun and all that, but it's really the human, or at least the teenage turtle, part that has kept the series from being too alienating all these years.

Post By http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/08/07/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-reviewed-have-you-ever-seen-a-michael-bay-movie-well-heres-another-one/