Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

An Exercise In Nonsense

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES is a shamefully bad Hollywood comic book blockbuster produced by Michael Bay, who really should know better. I'm a fan of the 1980s TV series but this is nothing like that show and instead an example of the usual soulless, mindless, unoriginal trash currently filling cinemas. Gone has the look, warmth, and humour of the turtles themselves, to be replaced by motion captured CGI hulks who make incessant and deeply unfunny one-liner jokes whenever they're on screen. Watching their supposed 'camaraderie' is an embarrassment and don't get me started on the voice acting. Megan Fox shows up to remind you why she's never had a 'proper' Hollywood career while others like William Fichtner should really know better. As with all films like this, things start off slow but by the end it's turned into one giant, aimless, generic-feeling CGI action set-piece spectacular that just goes on and on and on.

Like the summary says, ignore the haters. This movie was awesome and long overdue. Aside from Megan Fox playing as April (which is why I didn't give it a full 10) I really enjoyed this movie. I don't understand what all the fuss is about. Everyone has their own opinions I guess but don't let all the bad reviews stop you from watching it.

I'm a 31 year old guy who grew up on the old TMNT cartoons, games and toys of the 1980s and 1990s. I'm heavily nostalgic for the old TMNT series, and I wrote this movie off the very second I found out about it after its announcement.Fast forward two years, I still hadn't seen it. I heard online that it was garbage (but, of course, the internet has a habit of saying that about everything) and people I know in real life either said it was a little disappointing or just average.After deciding to give the movie a go when I was looking for something to watch on Netflix, I was actually pretty surprised by the movie. Granted I went in with absolutely zero expectations, but still! I didn't feel that, in any real way, that this movie was awful. It's not great and it has a lot of big flaws, but it's not terrible. As a longtime TMNT fan, I didn't quite like how the turtles in this movie are so intertwined with April's past. I also felt that Leonardo and Donatello were criminally underused in this movie. Both had as much personality as the cardboard boxes their pizza comes in. Michaelangelo didn't get to do much, but his goofy and fun-loving personality was definitely evident. Raphael ended up being way more hot-headed than he should be, and I feel like the writers put way too much attention on him. Raphael had the most screen time (and lines) of any of the turtles by a significant margin, and for no really valid reason. Late in the movie when the four turtles believe they're about to die, everyone but Raphael throws out a quick one- liner. What does Raphael? He spews out a long monologue about how he loves his brothers and his own deep insecurities. I didn't really like this aspect of the movie. Way too much attention on Raphael.Shredder in the movie looked goofy. Much like in Bay's Transformers movies, Shredder here suffers from a case of his design being overthought. As a result, his "costume" just looks very cluttered and messy due to them trying to cram way too much detail into it. They should've gone simple, like in the old cartoon or even like in the movies from the 1990s.Megan Fox was surprisingly okay in the movie. Of course there were MUCH better choices for April O'Neil, but I feel that they did a good job of downplaying Megan's sex appeal here and making her a pretty legitimate character with aspirations, goals, and an actual personality. She wasn't really here for the T&A for once, though there was that one scene where Will Arnett's character was checking out her butt when she was hanging out of a window. I've been critical of Megan Fox before and I've never liked her as an actress, but I felt like she was actually pretty likable in this movie (and you can't really blame her specifically for April being shoehorned in as the main character, which was a misstep).William Fichtner, one of the most criminally underused actors in Hollywood today, did about as well as you could hope with the material he was given. His acting and delivery was 100% solid, but his character's ambitions seemed kind of murky and poorly thought out. His whole end game was just to make a lot of money and to get "stupid rich" even though he was clearly insanely wealthy to begin with.There are a lot of negative points above, but I still thought that this movie was okay and was very watchable. I liked the personalities of Michaelangelo and Raphael, some of the action scenes were well done, and Splinter (despite looking a little weird) had some great moments. The final fight was a little anti-climactic, but I didn't mind that too terribly.Overall, an average movie. If you go in with an open mind and zero expectations, you should be able to find this movie to be pretty watchable. It won't end up being very memorable, but it might entertain you for most of its running time.

Michael Bay has a history of taking a much loved property and rebooting it while destroying everything that made it so loved and successful in the first place.Now it's the Turtles turn and although Michael Bay is only the Producer on this one it still suffers from all his trademark madness.Obviously the most important part of a TMNT movie is the Turtles right? not in this movie it isn't, it's April O'Neill who has top billing here and it's a disaster.The character is supposed to be a top investigative journalist but she is just so stupid, the only reason she is a credible reporter is that all her colleagues are even worse.Meagan Fox is terrible in this role, she might as well have been a cardboard standee for all the emotion on display. She has the same spaced out look on her face the whole way through. April is also very poorly written with no scenes of any real depth, You get the feeling that they knew Meagan Fox was to play her and knowing that she can't act, dumbed it down intentionally.Miss fox was cast for one reason, she looks hot in the advertising, something to draw in moviegoers who are then disappointed that in reality she isn't sexy at all because she lacks something that the original April, played by Judith Hoag, had in bucket loads, personality.Now we get to the Turtles themselves which are by far the worst versions of these characters to date. Firstly they look hideous, it's no wonder they live in the sewers. Secondly they also suffer from April's no personality syndrome, the exception being Michelangelo who is a total jerk who constantly makes sexual innuendos and jokes at inappropriate times destroying all the dramatic tension.The other main character is of course Shredder and it is he who suffers the most. William Fichtner's character Eric Sacks is the same main villain and appears to be Shredder until ii's revealed Shredder is actually just this guy stands in the corner.Unfortunately the terrible script is least of this movie's problems, it's real enemy is the CGI. Every time the turtles engage in any action it feels like a different movie as they fly all over the screen and the cameras spin around all over trying to distract you from how awful it looks.This becomes a real millstone around the movies neck and totally destroys the end of this movie. The final battle with Shredder looks like a video game, there's nothing real for the audience to connect with. The 1990 movie may only have had 2 guys in rubber suits hitting each other but you felt every contact.When you can't do better than a movie that was made 20+ years earlier, you have to wonder why they bothered making this in the first place.