Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Released:  August 8th, 2014

Rated:  PG-13

Studio:  Paramount Pictures

Staring:  Megan Fox, Alan Ritchson, Jeremy Howard, Pete Ploszek, Noel Fisher, Will Arnett, Danny Woodburn, William Fichtner, Johnny Knoxville, Tony Shalhoub

Directed by:  Jonathan Liebesman

Written by:  Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, Evan Daugherty

Personal Bias Alert:  big Ninja Turtles fan as a kid, dislikes Michael Bay

6 of 10

           

            The dumbest idea I heard throughout the pre-production of this film was when they announced they were going with the title Ninja Turtles.  It beats out all the other ridiculousness (aliens, Brett Ratner) because it shows an inherent misunderstanding of their product.  They are TMNT.  Teenage.  Mutant.  Ninja.  Turtles.  The silliness is stated right in the title, and any effort to minimize or move away from that would be a fatal misunderstanding of why kids love it and why adults hold on to it.

            Now before everyone starts jumping down my throat about the Michael Bay bias, I know that he was not the director of this film.  It’s all the better for it, as Jonathan Liebesman brings a far more solid understanding of storytelling to the production than Bay has proven capable of in years.  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has a straightforward, coherent plot involving the turtle’s origins that is remarkably well paced.  Unlike Bay’s films, it’s not bloated, it doesn’t expect us to have a twenty minutes attention span, and it’s not trying to be serious.  I’m not arguing that it’s in any way remarkable.  In fact, it’s a very safe, blockbustery plot, but it’s a solid effort that blows Bay’s Transformers:  Age of Extinction out of the sewer.

            The brand is what I and many others clad in t-shirts and homemade costumes were coming for, and this film doesn’t disappoint.  We’ve all, filmmakers included, agreed that this is supposed to be a cheesy good time, and any fears that they were going to make the turtles too serious is assuaged early on.  The humor largely revolves around poking fun at the silliness of the product, and the jokes come fast and furious at the beginning of the film.  It’s here that Megan Fox shines.  No, she’s still not a great actress, but she’s often shown comedic chops and a willingness to make fun of her own vapid image.  This version of April O’Neil is perceived very similarly to Fox’s own image, which makes for comedic scenes that work due to Fox’s intimate familiarity with the jokes.  I have to give her credit for having a tough shell; there’s not many actors or actresses who have taken the barrage of criticism she has and come out able to laugh about it.

            The turtles themselves are rather generic, maintaining their basic characteristics from previous iterations without getting anything added.  Leonardo is the leader, Michelangelo the goofball, Donatello the brains, and Raphael the rebel (and my personal favorite).  Their size is really the only thing that’s changed.  They used to be equivalent to humans, but here, with the aide of motion-capture animation, they are muscle-bound behemoths.  Luckily, their strength isn’t that big of a factor, leaving their ninja skills firmly intact.

            There’s really one word to sum up this whole thing:  safe.  It doesn’t meddle with the TMNT formula and takes no chances with its story.  While not special, it does nothing terribly wrong, and its competency compares favorably to this summer’s Transformers and The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  That’s a pretty low bar, but this film wasn’t shooting very high.

Other Notes:

Ø  The one thing they did mess up was Splinter.  He never looks like a rat, always seems mildly disgusting, and simply doesn’t look real.

Ø  I can roll with the turtle shells being bulletproof, and not with their ability to shoot the bullets back out of their shells.

Ø  Apparently Raphael’s sunglasses are immovable.

Ø  Were the canisters the foot clan were trying to steal at the beginning of the film labeled nitro ethanol?

Transformers: Age of Extinction

Released:  June 27^th, 2014

Rated:  PG-13

Studio:  Paramount

Staring:  Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor

Directed by:  Michael Bay

Written by:  Ehren Kruger 

Personal Bias Alert:  haven’t seen anything in the Transformers line

3.7 of 10

            Hearkening back to my “Captain America:  The Winter Soldier” review, I went into “Age of Extinction” with almost no knowledge of anything Transformers.  I’ve seen none of the movies or the television show.  I don’t even recall playing with the toys.  Now, that doesn’t mean I went into this movie with an entirely open mind.  I know the less-than-stellar reputation that its director, Michael Bay, has, and I’m aware of the critical punching bag the movie series has become.  It seems to have taken on the sins of all the dumb, CGI laden explosion fests that have littered our summer movie screens, with each installment being offered up for the weary, sardonic critics to rip apart with frustrated ferocity.  And yet, people go to see them.  Each film has earned more than the last, with “Age of Extinction’s” predecessor earning over 1 billion dollars.  I couldn’t see how a film series with that kind of earning power could be a complete mess, so I tried to give this film a fair shot.  I set my mind to blockbuster mode, bought some nachos (I’m not a popcorn fan), and plopped myself down for a Friday evening romp.

            As we all know, the human cast has been revamped, with Mark Wahlberg’s Cade taking over as Optimus Prime’s best bud.  Cade and his beautiful daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz), get sucked into a battle between transformers, the CIA, some evil transformer thing named Lockdown, and a tech corporation.  It sounds insane, which it is, and after 165 minutes I didn’t really understand why they were all fighting each other.  Instead of being told with a traditional 3-act structure, the film feels like it was told by that guy who tells all his stories in the “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then THIS happened!” structure.  Sure, there’s a series of escalating encounters between the groups, but there isn’t a real narrative reason for why everything hits the fan at once, it just does.

            Wahlberg is a competent lead for the film, with his over-buff physique fitting into the excess surrounding him remarkably well.  He and the rest of the cast aren’t given anything to do, but he sells the protective father trope and the nauseatingly bad humor okay.  Peltz is given even less to do, but she never embarrasses herself, unlike her onscreen boyfriend played by Jack Reynor.  Reynor is hampered with an awful, inexplicably Irish character that he fails to make believable or enjoyable.  Other, more established actors like Kelsey Grammer, Stanley Tucci, and Titus Welliver fare about as well as Wahlberg, turning in competent performances that will bolster their box office credibility. 

            Now as I said, I went into this film searching for whatever it was that made people keep coming back to the series, and its saving grace turned out to be exactly what I thought it would be:  the special effects.  They’re dazzling, pulling off everything from car chases to robots transforming to massive, magnetic spaceships.  It all looks very realistic, and it actually seems to exist in the same world as the live-action stuff.  That’s something that’s not often pulled off, so a massive amount of credit needs to go to the special effects folks.  But don’t discount Michael Bay’s work, either.  He’s a populist filmmaker, and even if his films aren’t artistically great, he manages to hit on something that a lot of people like.  I didn’t like this film, but I’m willing to stand up and admit that I liked “Armageddon” when it came out in 1998 (with the caveat that I was a kid at the time).

            As an adult, I find Bay’s films to be shockingly honest about how dumb he expects the audience to be.  We are led by the hand through any emotional moments, and the dialogue is filled with characters stating their most basic thoughts.  The plot is so rudimentary that it almost doesn’t exist as an actual story, instead playing out as a series of “me want this item, so I go get it” events.  The spectacle aspect of it still works just as well as it did when I was a kid, and I think with some paring down, there is a harmless, Saturday night basic cable movie in here somewhere.

            Other Notes (Silly Blockbuster Version):

Ø  How did Cade’s tiny little weapon matter at all in the last battle?

Ø  How was Cade strong enough to stop Lockdown from crushing him?

Ø  Why did they take the time to show a car flipping around and the tire hitting a guy’s face midair?

Other Notes (Regular Version):

Ø  Sitting down to take notes on this movie, I remembered that there was a friend of Cade’s who died at the beginning.  Boy had I totally forgotten about him.

Ø  This film has a weird idea of freedom.  Twice a group of robots are told that they are free, then in the next breath they are told that they are under the command of the robot who set them free.  That ain’t free.

Ø  I thought Mark Wahlberg’s shirt sleeves were going to pop for sure.

Ø  The product placement is shameless.  The Budweiser scene is obvious enough, but did you notice the Goodyear logo that was also in the background of that scene?