Finally got to catch Ninja Turtles
SPOILER FREE
Let me start off by saying the original trilogy of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a big part of my childhood growing up. The original 1990 film is a classic. The Secret of the Ooze is a decent sequel to the first movie and had some very cool moments such as the Super Shredder and Vanilla Ice's cameo. The third movie wasn't up to the standards set by the first two films and was easily the weakest, but having witnessed the atrocity of Michael Bay's reboot, I'll gladly revisit that entry anyday over this mess.
The reboot Ninja Turtles does very little to carry on the great legacy of the heroes in the half shell and actually manages to disgrace it by completely capturing the characters wrong, The biggest slap in the faces to fans of the original films are the characters of Splinter and Shredder. Splinters character was off in the fact that he wasn't the wise master that the original films and cartoons portrayed him as. Here he's freely pushing the turtles around and attacking them and the cops. Since when was Splinter such a hard ass to his sons? Shredder was a great villain in the turtles comics and cartoons but here he had virtually no personality. The actor playing him is barely visible for a few moments in the whole film, and just dons a slick suit and begins beating up the turtles. Another issue lied within the Ninja Turtles themselves. They don't feel like they have unique personalities like the original films showed them, and they come off as being hip and street thugs who are disguised as turtles and say a bunch of awful punch lines. They are rarely funny and make you hardly care about them. visually they look stunning as the look may feel awkward at time but eventually grows on you, but their personalities are all messed up. What was Whoopi Goldberg doing in this movie? She only had a few scenes in the movie and her character's story arc went nowhere. She did not get to see if the Turtles really exist nor choose to support them in a female Perry White style. Megan Fox is severely miscast is April O Neil, she is nowhere near the level of greatness that the character from the original films and the cartoon shows possessed. She only had one facial expression the entire time which was her clinching her teeth in shock, and her male sidekick ended up coming of as being annoying, pointless and irritating as few of his lines were funny, The entire film felt like 4 to 5 big action set pieces slapped together and called a movie. The film hardly possesses a form of life and doesn't really have the dark atmosphere that the original film had. The little moments of tribute or homages to the 1990 film are noteworthy but the unsatisfactory result of the film hardly makes them worth mentioning. It was pretty clear watching this movie that there wasn't a great deal of care being taken with the source material and it painfully shows in the movie. It had no heart and there isn't that sense of magic that the original film had that's present here, and just goes to show that Michael Bay has no regard for the fans or the source material. Ninja Turtles is a bland, uninspired reboot that's bound to piss off many of the purists of the Turtles legacy and add more fuel to the fire of his haters, that he is a huge contributor to the death of cinema.
In conclusion, if it's eye candy and special effects you want, then this movie should meet your requirements of being watchable popcorn entertainment. If you're a purist of the Ninja Turtles story then this movie will not only infuriate you, but inspire a divine hatred for Michael Bay. This movie has a lot of things in it that didn't work and wasn't needed, only making it feel bland and empty as a whole. It is not the colossal train wreck that was Age of Extinction but it isn't too far off. It's really that bad and that's the sad part. I wanted to like it.
3/10
No comments:
Post a Comment