2014's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a bad film. I say this not only as a fan of the Ninja Turtles, but as a fan of cinema in general. Granted, we could have gotten something much, much worse, with an anglofied Shredder and an outerspace turtle dimension, but one can hardly use the evidence as to what this film almost was to defend what this film is. You might as well look at a plane crash with no fatalities and label it a successful flight, simply because "hey, things could have been way, way worse".
I would say that the plot should be familiar to everyone, considering the origin of the Ninja Turtles is roughly as iconic as those of Spider-Man or Batman by now; four baby turtles are exposed to some mutagenic ooze and are raised by a mutant rat who teaches them the ways of ninjitsu and names them after famous Renaissance painters. I would say this, had the plot to this movie not come off as an attempt to change the source material in as many negative ways as possible. In this interpretation, it was a young April O'Neil (here portrayed by Megan Fox, whom Hollywood is still trying to convince us is the hottest woman alive for some reason) who named Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michaelangelo (Johnny Knoxville/Pete Ploszek, Jeremy Howard, Alan Ritchson, and Noel Fisher respectively) and introduced them to the joys of pizza. She named Splinter (mo-capped by Danny Woodburn, voiced by Tony Shaloub) as well, ushering them to the safety of a nearby sewer grate when her father's laboratory goes up in flames. After she liberates the test animals from the blazing inferno instead of saving her own father, the critters begin to grow and mutate in the sewers of New York City, growing up into shadowy teenage protectors who defend the Big Apple from the evil forces of the Foot Clan.
It's really baffling to me why so many of these changes were made. Is it really necessary to tie April's origins so closely to those of the turtles? Just how many pages of script did this massive convenience save? I can understand streamlining some aspects of a story when it is adapted to the big screen; a film has way less time to tell a tale than a book or a TV show. That said, every major change here works to the disservice of the film. In the original source material, Master Splinter was the pet rat of one Hamato Yoshi, a master of Japanese martial arts. After Yoshi is murdered by the Shredder and Splinter is mutated into the turtles' sensei, he applies what he learned from watching his old master to train them in the ways of the ninja. It's a little silly to imagine a pet rat retaining that kind of information (let alone harboring notions of samurai vengeance), but it's a bit of a silly property. You're allowed to be a little far-fetched in a movie about adolescent genetically-altered kung-fu terrapins. For seemingly no reason, the filmmakers at Platinum Dunes felt it necessary to alter this story point so that Splinter teaches the four turtles out of a ninjitsu book he happened to find in the sewer. With this simple alteration, the filmmakers have eliminated any and all gravitas between Splinter and Shredder. Imagine if, instead of being Luke's father, Darth Vader was just some guy. Now imagine how much this slight change would take away from the climax of Return of the Jedi. It's a pointless addition that does nothing to help the final product, but then again, that appears to be a recurring theme with this movie.
Speaking of villains, the ones here are completely mediocre; given the diverse array of loud, colorful baddies that fill the Turtles' rogues gallery, this is one of the worst possible things they could be. I'm almost tempted to say that the Shredder (Tohoru Masamune) is pretty cool, but I just can't bring myself to do it. His robotic battlesuit is an overly-busy hunk of blades and chrome leftover from one of the Transformers movies and any time spent out of his power armor has him relegated to the classic role of "shadowy threatening Japanese man who speaks to his lackeys in Japanese, only for them to reply in English". I suppose children don't like reading, after all. Our other villain comes in the form of Eric Sacks (William Fitchner), Shredder's adopted son. His plan is to release a bunch of toxic gas from the roof of his own skyscraper, then sell the antidote to the US government for an absurd amount of money. He hopes to do this all without anyone realizing that the poisoning of New York was his doing, despite the gas being released from the roof of his building and stored in containers with his company name emblazoned on them. He and Shredder attempt to execute this masterstroke without either of them wearing a gas mask. So a fabulously wealthy man attempts a poorly-thought-out act of domestic terrorism in an attempt to become marginally more wealthy; this is the primary conflict of this movie. We don't even get closure when it comes to the antagonists. We last see Shredder laying in a crater in Times Square and Sacks gets clobbered by Will Arnett before disappearing entirely. One might think Will Arnett is the one saving grace here, but he is sadly given nothing good to work with (though the film did earn a fair amount of brownie points for an admittedly brilliant Arrested Development reference).
Truthfully, the only thing this movie got even marginally right is the Turtles themselves. Leo, Donnie, Raph, and Mike are all genuinely enjoyable to watch (when they're not farting or spouting already-dated pop culture references, that is). The best scene in the entire movie is the four of them just beat-boxing like goofballs in an elevator right before the final battle; it's a nice, genuine moment in a soulless, cynical cash-grab of a movie. Had there been more moments where this film acted like an actual film, in which strong moments are born of good characters interacting with each other, there would be something salvageable here. One of the things I really adored about James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy (coincidentally released just one week before Ninja Turtles in the summer of 2014) was that it felt like a labor of love. There was a legitimate feeling that the filmmaker believed in his product and wanted to deliver a good adaptation of a property that people would enjoy. There was love and care and substance put into it from the very beginning. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, on the other hand, is not that kind of movie.
This is the kind of movie that feels as though it was born and crafted in a board room, made not out of passion, but out of necessity. The cartoon is doing well, the toys are selling, we need a film adaptation; it doesn't need to be GOOD, children will see anything. Just make a movie about Ninja Turtles, toss in some blatant ads for Skype and Project Almanac and call it a day. The most tragic irony is, even when viewed from this pessimistic perspective, the movie still fails. This isn't a movie about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; it's a movie about April O'Neil and occasionally Raphael. Then again, the sequel's going to have WWE's Sheamus as a giant talking rhinoceros, so maybe there's something salvageable here after all.
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