Review: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (2014)

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES  (FANTASY/ACTION)
1 out of 4 stars
Directed by Jonathan Liebesman
Starring: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, Pete Ploszek, Jeremy Howard, Danny Woodburn, Johnny Knoxville (voice role), Tony Shalhoub (voice role), Whoopi Goldberg, Tohoru Masamune
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence.
101 minutes
Verdict: A dull, headache-inducing endeavor, the Ninja Turtles haven't exactly become the Transformers like was feared, but they're no better.  Frenetic, impersonal and rarely funny, there's no suggestion here that a sequel is deserved, or that one won't come along anyway.
YOU MAY ENJOY TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (2014) IF YOU LIKED:
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (1990)
TMNT (2007)
TRANSFORMERS (2007)
WRATH OF THE TITANS (2012)
G.I. JOE: RISE OF COBRA (2009)
 
The appeal of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a largely inexplicable cultural phenomenon.  Beginning with an underground comic book created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in 1984 meant as a parody of some popular comic books that involved urban ninja clans and mutated teenagers, the Ninja Turtles rose to hugely unlikely popularity through merchandising and an animated television series.  The Turtles became a major presence in the pop culture landscape of the late 1980s and early 1990s, an unusual case of an ironic cult property exploding into the mainstream to appear on lunchboxes and in their own video games and film series.  But like all fads, the popularity of the Ninja Turtles fizzled out eventually, becoming dormant after a third film, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES III, was a financial and critical disappointment in 1993, the popular animated series wrapped up in 1996, and a 1997 live-action television series was canceled after one season.  Multiple attempts have been made since to bring the Turtles back to their former popularity as a successful franchise, but the question has to be asked: Can the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles exist beyond the realm of a 1980s icon?  Clearly Paramount and Michael Bay, who have already struck gold (strictly financially speaking) with their collaboration on bringing the Transformers, a similar 1980s cultural icon, to the big screen with lots of explosions and visual effects aimed at adolescent males, are hoping they can do the same for Ninja Turtles, but it's clearly not a sure thing.
In the new $125 million, PG-13-rated, live-action attempt to breathe new life into the TMNT, Megan Fox stars as April O'Neil, a television news reporter in New York City, currently relegated to lightweight stories which she covers with her cameraman Vernon (Will Arnett), but struggling to break into bigger material.  The city lives under the covert thumb of the Foot Clan, a Japanese criminal organization led by a warlord known as Shredder (Tohoru Masamune), and April hopes to get her big scoop by exposing the Foot's secret operations, but she stumbles upon something much bigger when she witnesses a quartet of vigilantes thwarting a Foot heist.  The vigilantes are six-foot-tall teenage turtles with advanced ninjutsu training and ridiculously ripped muscles; the leader, Leonardo (motion capture performed by Pete Ploszek, voiced by Johnny Knoxville), the angsty bad boy, Raphael (motion capture performed/voiced by Alan Ritchson), the jokester, Michelangelo (motion capture performed/voiced by Noel Fisher), and the brains, Donatello (motion capture performed/voiced by Jeremy Howard).  The results of a laboratory experiment that April's late father worked on years before, they were raised by fellow lab test subject Splinter (motion capture performed by Danny Woodburn, voiced by Tony Shalhoub), a rat sensei with a fu manchu.  When the Turtles are discovered by the Foot Clan, they become targets of Shredder and his partner, businessman Eric Sachs (William Fichtner), who want the genetic material possessed in the Turtles for a diabolical scheme with citywide consequences.

In my heart, I wanted to have fun watching this film.  I know it's the Ninja Turtles, and that comes with a lot of baggage and is based in an ironic concept, which doesn't necessarily lend itself to cinematic possibilities, but I really think a good, fun movie is possible involving them.  On the other hand, this movie is coming from Michael Bay as a producer, who is a master of bad blockbuster-making, and Jonathan Liebesman as a director, who previously worked on the horrifically dull WRATH OF THE TITANS and BATTLE LOS ANGELES, so my head wanted me to be apprehensive.  Unfortunately, my head won this bet handsomely.
Very, very little of this film works.  Even as bad as I knew it could be, but I hoped it wouldn't be, it's worse.  The cinematography is dizzily frenetic throughout, and it definitely hinders the action scenes, which are already not helped by the CGI overload.  Certainly we've reached a point in visual effects where, even if we can still tell that a character is an effect created in a computer, it is possible to render that knowledge inconsequential within the film, as is evident in last month's DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, and as far back as Gollum in THE LORD OF THE RINGS over a decade ago, but TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES never even approaches that.  The title characters never feel like anything more than a visual effect, and an unpleasant one to look at, at that.  I have no emotional investment in these characters, so I don't care a fig for the fanboy complaints about the design being changed; all I know, is that these turtles are really unappealing to look at and annoying to boot.  I had no idea going in that the worst moments would be those involving the Turtles, especially considering that the lead is played by Megan Fox, a pretty but unremarkable actress who looks and acts significantly less like a porn character than she did in Bay's Transformers films.  But the Turtles aren't even the worst CGI effects in this film; that dishonor goes to Splinter, who, as a giant anthropomorphic rodent with stereotypically Japanese characteristics is an inherently difficult character to pull off, but looks even worse than the puppet from the 1990 film.
There is an effort to make a point of the comedy in the "action-comedy," but most of the jokes fall flat, even with the usually hilarious Will Arnett getting substantial screen time.  The screenplay, from Evan Daugherty, and Josh Appelbaum and Andre Namec, the latter two who teamed up to write the excellent MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE- GHOST PROTOCOL, is dull and lazy (I counted two instances where the clearly labeled and weirdly specific button to press in case of emergency cliche was used), and nothing about the characters are interesting enough to care about.
Thankfully, not including credits, the movie clocks in at a relatively short 95 minutes, but it feels longer and yet lightweight, like not much has happened.  Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies clearly are hoping they have a franchise starter on their hands, but if this is a sign of things to come, the Ninja Turtles may as well be left to their nostalgic slumber on the Nickelodeon channel where bored children tune in on lazy afternoons.