Short Round: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) **/*****

Just the title Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is probably enough to turn mainstream audiences off of this crazy property. It’s ridiculous—the kind of stuff that only kids could ever like. The fact is though, ever since the original TMNT comic books were turned into a toy line and a cartoon series in the late 80s, the turtles have become a worldwide phenomenon on the back of its little kid fans alone. It’s likely Platinum Dunes had higher aspirations when it came to relaunching them as this live action, big budget, possible franchise-invigorator though. Now there’s a possibility that the Turtles can be followed by new kid fans as well as nostalgia-seeking former fans, which could possibly make it the sort of genre-crossing, money-earning hit that the Marvel movies or the Transformers movies have become. The idea is a sound one, except for the fact that any movie about turtles who mutate into pizza-loving, Renaissance artist-named, ninja teenagers is going to have to primarily concern itself with being a mindless good time in order for broad audiences to really embrace it, and a mindless good time isn’t what this new TMNT movie is at all. As a matter of fact, it’s mostly an exposition-filled bore.

It doesn’t do everything wrong. The special effects that bring the Turtles themselves to life are generally impressive, and may even be an improvement over the Jim Henson’s Creature Shop efforts that brought the Turtles of the 1990 film to life (when we’re watching character-building scenes where they’re just sitting around), and the script seems to have a strong handle on who the turtles are as people—some stream lining and rewriting has been done in respect to their origins, but each Turtle is still easily recognizable as the distinct personality we’ve known them as, and the group dynamic is still largely in tact, so it’s hard to complain about anything that’s happened to the characters. But, on the other hand, this movie sticks so closely to what we’ve gotten in the past, character-wise, that it feels like a huge mistake for it to spend so much time explaining itself. Hollywood has made bad Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies before—really bad ones—but this is the first time they’ve made one that’s completely boring.

This Turtles movie comes after an entire trilogy of live action Turtles movies, countless animated series, countless comic books, countless video game spin-offs, and even an ill-advised holiday special, and yet we’re still asked to wait for a good half hour until we see the characters, as if we’re watching Jaws for the first time or something. This is a movie that has a rock-simple plot—mutants are created, mutants escape, their creators need to get them back—but it spends so much time explaining itself with flashbacks and expositional dialogue that you get a good hour in before the plot moves forward at all. Ninety percent of TMNT is its writers explaining away what Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are, like we’re not already aware, and like any excuse could ever be made for how ridiculous a concept it is in the first place, and the other ten percent is inert action sequences where the CG nature of all the effects rob everything of any reality, weight, or urgency, so that none of what you’re watching ends up mattering in the first place. This movie is everything that’s wrong with modern blockbusters, rolled into one big failure. It’s a remake of something we’ve had enough of, it’s derivative of everything else that’s come out in the last five years, it’s concerned more with empty spectacle than character-building, and it insults the audience’s intelligence at every turn. This was the Turtles’ big opportunity to move past its child-aimed roots and become a mainstream property, but if you happen to be past the age of a small child and you find yourself satisfied by this film, then you need to take a long, hard look at what exactly it is you do or do not demand from your entertainment. If you like this one, chances are you might be a Philistine.