You’re all familiar with Michael Bay produced films by now. You know what to expect: gratuitous cleavage shots, unnecessary explosions, poor writing and a huge budget. I would define Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as the logical conclusion to all that is Michael Bay. This film is not merely terrible, for that is too kind a word to use to describe it; I found myself being physically repulsed by every new scene which poured like sewer bilge out of the cinema screen.
The first, most apparent, problem with this trainwreck of a film is the way in which the eponymous turtles are represented. There’s no subtext to their character, they’re just crammed into archetypes. Donatello is intelligent because he drops phrases like “By my calculations” and “There’s a 0.00000001% probability that” into sentences that have no need for them; Michelangelo is funny because he farts a lot and borderline sexually harasses Megan Fox’s character. Every character is a shell – if you’ll pardon the pun – of the original cartoons; personality is stripped away to reveal the basest, most easily digestible rubbish that it’s possible to spoon feed an audience.
Megan Fox plays April O’Neil, the human ally of the turtles, a character we’ve all seen a million times before. Spunky journalist forced into low class reports but looking for the big time when she stumbles upon the story of a lifetime! Sound familiar? That’s because she is the same as every reporter character in any action movie ever made.
The enemies of the turtles, the Foot Clan, are just basic henchmen. They run head-on at the turtles despite the fact that they’re all armed with machine guns. Although maybe running at them is a good idea as it’s revealed midway through the film that bullets bounce off the turtles’ hides, totally eliminating any sense of peril the viewer may have had (that is assuming that the audience didn’t want the turtles to die immediately and end the travesty early). Their leader, the Shredder, is a virtually mute giant, scrapping anything that ever made him remotely engaging. In this film the main villain is the kindly-seeming Eric Sacks, a man who turns out to be a wrong-’un in the most predictable twist in film history.
The worst thing about this film is that it would probably be just mediocre if the acting wasn’t so abysmal. Really talented people give unusually awful performances. Will Arnett, of Arrested Development and Bojack Horseman fame, is shoehorned into the most generic white male character it’s possible to play and the real actors are mixed in with people who look like they were allowed to be in a film as a favour to their mothers.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a special kind of terrible, not even so-bad-it’s-good, just painfully dull. And in a film about anthropomorphous ninja turtles, to be dull is to lose all meaning. The dialogue is clunky and the fight scenes are too safe and a complete mess of CGI. There’s no impact to it and no class, the least anyone could say about Michael Bay is that he makes fun films but this one is so monotonous that I can’t even say that.
Ordinarily I have a respect for truly, irredeemably horrible films but this one transcends that. Don’t even watch it as a joke, it’s not worthy of that. The solitary good point of this movie is the schadenfreude that this could be a career ender for the team involved. Except of course it isn’t, as the sequel has already been commissioned. The horror.
The Sixth Form Journal 