It goes without saying that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a silly franchise. Just saying the title, if it doesn't get a chuckle out of you, triggers that funny vibe in your mind that says "Why the hell are we even talking about this?" Why do I mention this? Because out of all the film adaptations for this franchise to ever come out, out of three live-action films, a flopped CG-animated entry, and now, two more live-action films (among a few crappy underground spin-offs), the only film that managed to make it work was the first live-action film from 1990, which, incidentally, wasn't originally studio-produced. It wasn't perfect by any means, but the creators were aware that if fans weren't invested, they wouldn't keep coming back for more, so they chose to take a more serious, well-paced, well-developed route that held a gritty style, fun characters, and even a few strong moments of characterization. Every adaptation after that, however, was merely a studio product, as studios kept looking at Ninja Turtles as the easiest franchise to cash in on and decided to utilize every manipulation cliche during each era as their attempt to get audiences into seats, and who better to utilize manipulation cliches than the master of manipulation himself, Michael Bay? Hence, we have not the first, but the SECOND Bay-produced Ninja Turtles movie, entitled Out of the Shadows, and frankly, I've grown weary of the lack of effort here.
Now, I'll go on board by saying I didn't think the first movie from 2014 was THAT bad. It wasn't good by any means; its character development was incredibly thin, the turtles themselves held some pretty hideous designs, and a lot of the rewrites and production problems were clear as daylight. However, considering that the pitch of a Michael Bay produced Ninja Turtles adaptation with Megan Fox as April O'Neil sounds more like a Robot Chicken sketch than it does a legitimate film project, I feel that it could have been a lot worse than it actually turned out. When compared alongside his Transformers films, it didn't feel overlong, the action scenes were well-paced and cohesive, and the personalities of the turtles were pretty accurate, albeit not fully developed.
I kept all that in mind when seeing the sequel, and it raised my expectations.... perhaps a little too high.
In this film, we rejoin the turtles as they find out that a scientist named Baxter Stockman is working with the Shredder, who busts out of prison, along with two other criminals named Beebop and Rocksteady, only, through a glitch in Baxter's teleportation system, gets sent to another dimension where he meets a monster known as Krang. They very sporadically come to an agreement where Shredder will collect a few items to put together a device that will allow Krang to teleport his war machine, the Technidrome, to Earth for a takeover. Krang then gives him a serum that allows him to transform Beebop and Rocksteady into mutants so that they can help him fight against the turtles as they try to put a stop to his schemes.
If that doesn't sound like one of the most poorly assembled attempts at cramming in giant chunks of fan service in the world, I don't know what does.... Oh wait, yes I do...
This movie has the exact same problem as Nickelodeon's other attempt at a live-action franchise, The Last Airbender; it attempts to cover a lot of material in its franchise in a very short running time. But whereas that film had too much material that it absolutely had to cover as an adaptation of the entire first season of the show, this one did not need to cover as much ground as it did. As much as the first film could have benefited from a few more scenes of establishment, it at least kept its plot simple and straight-forward for its condensed running time. Here, they're trying too hard to cram in all these characters when maybe one or two additional characters would have been enough to get fans' attention. This was a smarter trick that Marvel pulled off with their movies, introducing two or three characters at a time for each movie and utilizing its already established characters to their full advantage. Heck, this film doesn't even have fully developed characters to hinge on!
Even on a technical level, it's not all that impressive. The action scenes are well-constructed and riveting, though not what I would call thrilling due to a lack of investment in the characters, but the CGI on the characters is fake, alongside the always disturbing motion-capture animation in which the characters are ALWAYS MOVING. And unlike the first film where the CG characters fighting against real-life Foot Clan soldiers was a little impressive, here, it's literally reduced to CG characters fighting CG characters, and it's just as much of a messy ensemble as you might think.
The terrible cast is kind of a standout here as well. Megan Fox gets her sensual side exploited one too many times throughout the flick, something the first film surprisingly avoided, and while Will Arnett is barely in the film, his part is still confusing and kinda pointless. But the worst has to be Stephen Amell as Casey Jones; it's literally as if they just took an entirely different character, threw a mask on him, gave him a hockey stick, and called him Casey Jones. You want proof? He's a cop in this version. Yeah, let that sink in.
It shouldn't come as any shocker that a Bay-produced Ninja Turtles movie sucks, but honestly, I'm kinda shocked that there's even a sequel to begin with. We might as well face facts that no studio-produced Ninja Turtles movie will ever hold up a candle to the classic 1990 film, no matter how many modern cliches studios try to cram into each adaptation.
My rating:
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