Nostalgia is the engine of the post-modern dilemma that
enables our inability to create new cultural or artist forms, in favor of
remixing or rebooting the old standards with an updated sheen. Studios green-light movies like the recent
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” reboot because they trust the success of the
brand-name, and judging from the 65 million dollar opening and the announcement
of a 2016 sequel, it would seem with good reason. Despite the public outcry
against an early draft of the script that leaked online a couple years back,
with the rumors of an added alien mythology and the confirmation of Megan Fox
cast in lead, these kinds of pre-recognized titles make money, usually by collecting
from the very same people who furiously blog against them.
Having been preached against on every forum
and every comment section on the web as the Michael Bay molestation of our
childhood to come, and gauging from the outrage against the hyper-detailed,
fulgliness of the new character designs that were revealed with the preceding
trailers and poster art, you would have thought this movie was destined to be a
flop of “Heaven’s Gate” proportions. But, as it turns out, you would have thought
wrong, and, unfortunately, I am not surprised.
Though this most recent Ninja Turtles reboot wasn’t actually directed by
the infamously successful Michael Bay—only released through Bay’s remake-centric
production company, Platinum Dunes—and directed by Jonathan Liebesman who knows
how to suck all on his own, responsible for matinee, empty-calorie buffet slop
like “Wrath of the Titans” and “Battle LA,” this is exactly the kind of
over-buttered pop-corn rubbish you might imagine it to be. Though the original
iterations of the franchise were never Shakespeare, TMNT- 2014 might actually
succeed in making the internet’s most angry dissenters wish Bay had been at the
helm all along.
Unchanged
from the established origin, four baby turtles are mutated through genetic goo
called mutagen and are released into the sewers, where they eventually become
super-strong, humanoid ninja teenagers. Under the streets of New York, their
master Splinter, a mutant rat, has spent their most recent years training the
team to fight against a newly organized ninja terrorist gang known as the Foot
Clan. Journalist April O’Neil (Megan Fox) has an inkling of the Turtles vigilantly
work and is anxious to advance here career from covering ridiculous human-interest
pieces to exposing hard-hitting news about reptilian superheroes. Somewhere in the mix, an ex-colleague of
April’s scientist father named Eric Sacs (William Fichtner) is protecting the
Foot’s mysterious leader The Shredder, who has his own plans to repurpose the
mutagen that created his foes.
With
the studio’s primary interest in updating the base aesthetics of the Turtle’s
Saturday-morning appeal by changing their look, their surroundings, and their
outdated surfer colloquialisms, this movie serves us back a repackaged product
that breaks upon opening. It seems what
happened is while Liebesman and company got so caught-up in refurbishing all
the surfaces, they forgot to put back the nuts and bolts that make the story
work, leaving us with nothing to attach ourselves to except for the absurdity
of the premise. Rewrites and bad studio
notes are achingly visible as April’s unneeded origin is weaved into the
backstory of our heroes and the disparate parts of script are taped together
with function-based characters like Fichtner’s billionaire bad-guy and
comedically placed characters like April’s camera-man Vernon, awkwardly phoned-in
by television’s Will Arnett.
As was expected, this film is based entirely on
set-pieces and action spectacle, and while our minimally-written heroes are
flipping and kicking and sliding around in practically every scene they have
together, we can only piece together their individual characteristics through
snips of barely audible dialogue, buried underneath the overwhelming
sound-design. Visually, Liebesman tries to ape Bay’s crooked lens and whip-pan
style and even manages to ruin the fluidity of that with his usual epileptic
camera-work. Surprisingly, this movie doesn’t even fail in the same screeching,
headache-inducing ways found in the worst moments of the Transformer’s movies,
and instead settles for pandering fan-fare and bland ineptitude.Grade: D
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014
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