TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being rebooted by Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes - we all thought that was a great idea didn't we? What with all the wild success they had in remaking The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and so on.  Then some early concept design of the Turtles got released and we dared to hope it might not be all that bad.  'Hope' being the key word in that last sentence. There is a phrase that the young people are wont to use, that goes 'haters gonna hate'; and boy do the haters have a lot of ammo to go through with this stinkeroo of a picture (be warned, there lie moderate spoilers ahead).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a mess of a film. All logic is discarded at a very early stage and it's so full of plot holes a part of your mind wonders if this isn't some elaborate avant garde experiment to challenge our preceptions of coherence. The plot, flimsy as it is, has April O'Neil (Megan Fox) and the Turtles battling the mega-maniacal Foot Clan as they attempt to take over New York. Ruled by the iron fist of The Shredder, alongside William Fichtner's evil industrialist, Eric Sacks, they aim to infect New York with a deadly poison dispelled from atop a communications aerial, for which they can then market the antidote and get rich.   If this all sounds a little familiar then that's because if you substitute a woman with four turtles for friends, for a kid with miraculous superpowers, then you've got almost the exact same plot to Mark Webb's dismal Spiderman reboot.  With a tiny smattering of Transformers 3 thrown in for good measure. This means that not only is this film stupid, but it's lazy too. If you're going to rip off a better film (and by acknowledging that The Amazing Spider-Man is indeed a much better film, this should give you an indication of the depths at which TMNT lurks), you could at least rip off one with a half way decent plot instead of wrenching something straight out of the Hollywood-generic-macguffin-generator.

The meagre plus points on offer here run only as far as seeing character actor  William Fichtner in a main villian role, although he has far less to work with than many of his previous lackey / bad guy stooge parts. Also Will Arnett (Gob from Arrested Development) comes through with reputation largely intact as Vernon, the comic relief sidekick.  Otherwise it's 120 joy-free minutes.  It's full of wretched one-in-a-million coincidences that drive the plot as a substitution for any sensible writing -  the Turtles turn out to be April's beloved childhood pets whom she saved from a fire but then for some reason decided to chuck into the sewer! And rest of it is just flat out dumb. The Shredder is part robot and about half way through they seem to forget that there's actually supposed to be a person inside, so the Turtles spend the entire movie fighting what looks like a samurai transformer. The plot holes are ludicrous - if the bad guys need the Turtles' blood to make an antidote, why do they want to take all of it and kill them? Why not keep them alive to make more antidote and thus more money? And the dialogue is dreadful - "We're Ninjas, we're mutants and we're teenagers" - all in the service of teeing up crap one liners.

In the end we're left with a risible mess that desperately wants a shot at the Marvel brass ring, but lacks the intelligence to recognise what makes those movies such fun. The best TMNT movie thus far remains the 2007 cartoon. Watch that instead.

IMDB: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles