Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie review

Go ninja, go ninja, go!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the 2014 live-action reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In this movie, Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello are forced outside of hiding in the sewers to defeat the Shredder and save New York City.

Now, this isn't the childhood-ruining, cinematic tragedy that some fans have been making it up to be. I honestly think that that hate has stemmed from the fact that Michael Bay (director of the recent film Transformers: Age of Extinction) was producing. His stamp on the film is noticeable, but it's ultimately Jonathan Liebsman's directing that brings the film down heavily. 

This movie presents almost nothing visually appealing.Mostly everything from the character designs to the action sequences to even the way it was shot makes the film look like nothing more than a generic and bland blockbuster. Thankfully, however, the movie's tone wasn't a dark and somber tone (that it seems like most reboots are going for these days), but instead it (sorta) made up for its lack of visual appeal with a light-hearted, fun, and humorous tone. You can actually have fun with some scenes here.

An example of a fun action sequence in the movie is the only action sequence I enjoyed, and that is the action sequence which takes place on a snowy mountain. It was actually pretty fun and exciting, and there was even some comedy that surprisingly worked.

The biggest positive of the movie would probably have to be the turtles. The turtles' designs may have been questionable, but there individual character personalities were well established in the movie. I was expecting they'd just be brooding muscle-y chunks of CGI, but I was proven wrong. The voice work and the scenes where we just get to see the turtles interact with one another helped a lot in elevating this movie to something actually bearable.

The human characters on the other hand... not so great. Megan Fox as April O'Neil wasn't that bad, she was serviceable, but Will Arnett's character, man... was he horrible. His function in the movie was to drive our heroes around and occasionally crack a weird and awkward joke. His character was so cringe-worthy and so unnecessary. William Fichtner's character felt out of place. He'd pop up a few times in the movie, but you never really got the sense that he's adding anything to the plot, other than exposition to the audience. I felt that he could've been replaced by the Asian henchman Shredder has in the movie. 

If you really think about it, it wasn't a terrible showcase by Paramount and Nickelodeon this time around. They delivered on an okay, sorta fun movie, and they actually got their main characters right. No tragedy here, and nothing here that a sequel with a good director can't fix.