They’ve been around so long that theyāre now the Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles, and their ā80s vibe ā cowabunga, dude! ā is so strong that I kept expecting a cameo by Huey Lewis or Max Headroom.
But the reason the second big-screen relaunch of āTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtlesā in just tāhe last seven years is as forgettable as the previous effort is that bloāckbuster excitement is a little hard to whip up from a one-joke idea. Then again, thereās an entire hit movie built around a sharp-shooting, fast-talking raccoon, so what do I know?
Megan Fox, the former Shia LaBeouf colleague who has wide experience working with slimy little reptiles who think theyāre cool, is bland and insipid as a New York City TV reporter ā Lois Lame ā who stumbles across a shadowy vigilante band of underground-dwellā¤ing terrapins. Theyāre so super- secret that they splash their logo all over the scene every time they battle their villainous rivals, the Foot Clan. Theyāre led by sort of a āTransformersā version of Darth Vader crossed with Edward Scissorhands.
Wisecracking, pizza-scarfing brethren Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael aš¹nd Michelangelo turn out to be the same turtles April (Fox) once rescued, along with a super-intelligent rat, from her dadās lab when she was a little girl. The brothers were infected with your basic superpower serum and grew up in the sewers, where they were trained by their rat sensei in the art of karate ā turtle wax on, turtle wax off.
Together with her cameraman (Will Arnett), April strives to learn the secret behind the wealthy businessman who used to work with her father, but since the rich guy is played by ferret-faź©²ced William Fichtner ā a guy whose own mother probably says, āI donāt know, thereās just something skeezy about himā ā there isnāt a lot of suspense about where heāll end up. He says things like, āApril came early this yearā (whš³en April shows up at his house in winter) or, āTime to take a bite out of the Big Apple.ā
The turtlesā mix of fighting prowess and jaunty middle- school chatterš° (lots of uses of ābroā) might work for the Nickelodeon crowd, but for grown-ups, the comedy-action mash-up is as weird as if the Dark Knight took a break from belting the Joker toāØ plug Pizza Hut and bang out a hiphop beat on his nunchucks. The film saves up its sole instance of wit for the last 10 seconds, when the guys crank up āHappy Togetherā by the Turtles.
The clattering but generic climax (Fox winds up dangling from things, as per usual) is on top of the CondĆ© Nast building, which makes this film the worst idea to come from that location since Kimye were on the cover of Vogue. The sequel will need some fresh thinking, which seems unlikely to happen considering the toy-commercial nature of this one. But Iāll be first in line if you can promiseš me that TMNT will get their asses kicked by C.H.U.D.