Teenage Mutant Ninja Turd-les...

I only ever tend to write about films that I either really loved, or that I really despised. This is mostly because I find it a lot easier to write about something I have strong feelings for rather than something that didn’t stir up anything in me. Last night I went to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles knowing that I’d definitely be writing about it afterwards. The question was which side of the fence would the film fall?

Rather predictably it fell on the side that was already littered with franchises that I loved as a kid but were ruined by reboots later in life. Much like the recent Transformers reboot this current reincarnation of my much beloved heroes in a half-shell was lazily written to the point of perhaps being the worst film that I’ve seen in years. It wouldn’t be going too far to suggest that if you replaced the turtles with robots and Megatron with Shredder, that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is beat-for-beat the same film as Transformers. Complete with the same clichés, poorly written dialogue and nonsensical plot. Seriously this film is so lazily written that I feel okay about the terrible pun in the title of this blog post.

There were a couple of positives but I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel when I call them positives. The run time of the film is only around ninety minutes and there is absolutely zero Shia LaBoeuf. The animation is really rather good, if that sort of thing is what you appreciate most in a film, and Will Arnott is used brilliantly throughout.

More or less every other aspect of the film is woeful though. Many of the action scenes are muddled and confusing, making it hard to discern exactly what is going on. The film lacks any tension whatsoever because the turtles are literally bullet-proof and can easily overpower The Foot with ease. The dialogue is mostly terrible, the plot is full of holes and the film just in general lacks any sense of logic. I appreciate that it’s a film aimed at kids and about mutant turtles, but some effort could have been made to have a coherent story.

The sad thing is that the people that made this film know how terrible it was. One of the opening scenes actually included a conversation in which April O’Neil is reassured that it’s okay to be “foam” rather than “coffee” – or in other words it’s okay to report on terrible, lazily written puff pieces rather than endeavour to report on intelligent, hard-hitting news. This is the film-makers, not so subtly, letting the public know that they believe that it’s okay to make awful films rather than trying to make something great because “lots of people enjoy foam”. Except of course nobody actually orders a cup full of foam, they tend to order a cappuccino - which is of course delicious, well written coffee topped off with fun, light-hearted foam.

Unfortunately the makers of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are more than happy to hand you a cup full of foam…but that brown stuff underneath isn’t coffee. It’s just shit.

PS – After watching the film I got home and decided to sit down and try and list everything that annoyed me about the film.  I have listed them below for the enjoyment of nitpicky bastards like myself.

Wow…two Skype references in less than five minutes. Yay product placement.

So I guess all those bombs that The Hand planted in the subway station just didn’t go off?

Wow there’s so much tension between Raph and Leo…I wish I knew why though. I guess they’ll explain it later.

Wow Shredder is a bad arse and this scene is cool but it’s completely redundant because it’s the only character trait he shows throughout the film. This additional scene of it was not really required at all.

I have one question about Shredder…how did he get those scars?

How can Splinter, a rat, read…even more importantly, how can an American rat read Japanese?

How does he learn to be ninja master from reading a book?

Where has he got this huge store of ninja weapons from?

How does Donatello become so good at building awesome technology?

Where does he get all of the components to build his fabulous machines?

Oh good…a fart joke.

How is it possible that no matter how bad Raph gets his arse kicked he always has a toothpick in his mouth?

They could have used literally any song but Holla Back Girl and it would have improved this film.

Why are they having to sneak out of the sewers to watch TV when they clearly have wi-fi downstairs, earlier they were watching Keyboard Cat.

Why did April decide that it was more important to save her pets than try and save her dad? They were all in the lab together when the fire was raging. Seriously, April is a dick to her dad.

How did April escape this fire? We were told earlier that several people died so how did the little girl escape?

Oh good they turned Shredder into a robot, I guess there wasn’t enough similarities with the Transformers films already.

So Sacks has business cards with GPS trackers inside them? Okay that seems incredibly convoluted, so why does the signal only come online when April realises that it’s a trap?

Those tranquiliser darts are doing nothing at all to the turtles. Why even bother with them in the film? In fact why bother with guns either since the turtles are bulletproof. There is no point in having a weapon in a film, only to negate the effect of the weapon with no explanation. It just kills any dramatic tension anybody might feel.

So they captured three turtles but instead of looking for Raph they just assumed that he was dead? It’s lucky that The Foot are so lazy because this film really, really needed Raph to not be captured to continue.

So Donatello also has a GPS tracking device implanted somewhere on his person? Why did the signal only come online when Raph thought there was no hope.

Also one use of a GPS tracking device to move the story on is lazy, using it twice in the same film is just not making any effort.

Why does Sacks have these special turtle cages when he though the turtles were dead?

“We’ll drain all of their blood…even if it kills them!” Yup, I imagine that would definitely kill them…aren’t you a scientist?

Why do these turtle cages have a function to provide them with adrenaline injections?

How does an injection of adrenaline negate the fact that these turtles have had enough of their blood drained to nearly kill them?

Why is Shredder not killing Raph now that he’s unconscious? He has knife gun hands…it would be practically no effort. Instead he’s just leaving him.

“How did he get in the van?” Even the screenwriter doesn’t know that.

There is no way that Raph could know that Leonardo and the humans haven’t fallen off that cliff, he’s behind Michelangelo  so he can’t see over the edge of the cliff.

How did Shredder get to the skyscraper quicker than Sacks? Sacks rode in a helicopter?

Why is Shredder punching Leonardo in the stomach? He has knife gun hands. And swords. And Leo is literally unprotected.

Sacks did not kill O’Neil’s dad. We clearly saw him get trapped in that fire.

Wow…a lot of innocent people are going to die from this falling debris.

I guess at some point Raph and Leo resolved that tension they had at the start of the film. I’d probably care more if it had been explained or explored at any point.

Shredder was actually really simple to defeat in the end. They took turns jumping in the air and attacking him one at a time. Shame he could easily defend himself like he had done previously when they attacked him.

So Donatello said that the they couldn’t let the tower fall because the poison would be released if they did…but the tower got completely wrecked and everyone was okay?

How the fuck did the turtle’s survive the ending? It was an impossible to survive situation, they cut in close to Raph monologuing and then cut to a wide again and they had miraculously survived. With no explanation. At all.

How does the serum save Splinter? I thought it was an antidote to the poison they were going to release. Is it actually just a general cure for being hurt? How can it be a cure for getting the shit kicked out of you?

WHERE THE FUCK IS CASEY JONES?