‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Review

There's a scene early in 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' when the turtles are first meeting April O'Neil, as played by Megan Fox. The Turtles try to escape without being spotted, but April sees them and gives chase. On the top of the building, the Turtles are huddled up, proud of their work. "Like shadows in the night! Completely unseen..." Just then a flash goes off and we see April climbing up the fire escape taking pictures of them. The Turtles grab her and bring her up on the roof. From off-screen we can hear Michelangelo: "She's so hot! I can feel my shell tightening!"

It's weird pseudo-sexual moments like these where Michelangelo gets a turtle boner for a human female, that tell you all you need to know about this Michael Bay produced update. Gone are many of the beloved details from the original Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird comics or the popular cartoon series, which would be fine if Bay and director Jonathan Liebesman could've figured out some middle ground. Instead, we have a movie that's ostensibly made for small children and yet still features moments of female objectification that we'd see in one of Bay's R-rated features.

I'd say you should be aware of the basic 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' plot by now, but Bay and Liebesman have taken enough liberties that it may not be as familiar to some. In this version, the turtles are the creation of April's father, who was working on something called "Project Renaissance" and creating a mutagen for healing properties. He had lab turtles, the turtles turned into humanoids, who were trained in the sewers by a humanoid rat named Splinter.

The villains - which include both Shredder and Eric Sachs (William Fichtner), two completely different people - have created a gas that will kill the citizens of New York City, because of course they have. The mutagen-infused blood of the Turtles is needed for the antidote, which Sachs also wants because of a nefarious plan to sell Turtles’ blood as the only cure for the virus.

It's all very ... goofy. Don't go in to 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' and expect 'Batman Begins,' because this really is a kids movie and it's playing that up. And, we don't mean this is a kids movie like 'The LEGO Movie' was a kids movie. This is a movie made for kids and only kids. The adults in the audience might not laugh at the Keyboard Cat jokes but we're not sure they were ever meant to.

Fans have given the look of the Turtles a lot of grief (and rightfully so based on some of the earlier materials), but that's not even one of the film's larger problems. In the context of the film, they look fine. The mo-cap is done quite well actually and while they don't look like the classic Turtles of old, they're not what's holding the film back. One thing that really did take us out of the moment was the voice of Johnny Knoxville, who, with his Tennessee drawl, just doesn't have the right sound for Leonardo -- the no-nonsense leader of the team. Leonardo needs gravitas and Johnny Knoxville has a lot of things (we laughed mightily at 'Bad Grandpa'), but gravitas isn't one of them.

In the end, this movie seems like it's the classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by way of the new 'Amazing Spider-Man' movies (even down to the healing mutagen that turns people into amphibian humanoids). It's light and "fun" and very goofy. We just wish, for all that goofiness, they could find a way to treat their female characters with some respect.