When the head of a corporation threatens New York City, a group of mutated turtle warriors, trained in the arts of ninjutsu, must rise from the shadows and fight to protect their home.
Review:
Let me start off by saying that I did not have terribly high hopes for this film. I do not consider myself a hardcore Ninja Turtles fanatic. But I enjoyed watching the old TMNT cartoon series as a child, so I went into this one open minded. I must say that this film is pretty terrible. As a mindless popcorn flick, it's okay, but as a Ninja Turtle movie, it's disgraceful. This film is titled "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" purely for money.
It has a promising first ten minutes, and then it quickly turns into a carbon copy of Michael Bay's "Transformers". For instance, it includes non-human CGI characters fighting each other and constantly blowing stuff up for the remainder of the film, and the human characters are one-dimensional. I even features Megan Fox as the same character (sort of).
They pretty much ruined the characters. In the cartoon, April O'Neal is believeable, but here, she's a cardboard cutout. Splinter is okay in it, but they pretty much completely messed up the Turtles and shredder. I know that they are supposed to be mutants, but could they not have at least made the turtles more turtle-like? But hey, at least they had the decency to give them turtle shells so I guess that's excusable. Shreddar looks like and uninspired mishmash of Wolverine (yes, THAT wolverine) and Megatron in the sense that it's almost a blatant copy of the two.
***SPOILER AHEAD***
The storyline is idiotic and the script is juvenile. It's as if a 5-year old kid wrote this film. Almost none of the action scenes went anywhere. To punish the turtles for being disobedient, Splinter decides to use pizza (their favorite food) as a torture device. Also, what was that "Sacks" guy doing there in the first place. Do you want to know what the worst part is? They completely changed the back story. In the cartoon, Splinter was once a human being named Yoshi, who was an expert at Kung Fu, but was later exiled and turned into a rat, and came across four turtles that got into some ooze that made them anthropomorphic. In this film, the turtles were once April's pets and were being tested at a lab. Splinter was an ordinary rat who was in the same lab. Splinter and the turtles got injected by some chemical as they were escaping the lab. That's just stupid and downright insulting. I am not making this up.
Also, the humor is just a bunch of bland pop cultural references.
It tries desperately to cope with the likes of Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, and it fails on every level.
One positive thing is that it's a nice looking film. It has great cinematography and a neat animated opening sequence. But that's about it.
Overall, I found this to be a disgrace to the Ninja Turtle franchise and I do not recommend it. I have not been this upset with a live action film based on a cartoon since Dragonball Evolution. In fact, I put it in the same category.
If you have any appreciation for Ninja Turtles whatsoever, do yourself a favor and do not support this film.
This movie belongs in a sewer.
Max Scale:
1/10
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