"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" Review

Not good by any stretch of the imagination, though not nearly the disaster I had anticipated, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles merely squeaks by as mindless summer entertainment. It's nothing more than "froth," if you will, as Will Arnett's character puts it. Sometimes that's all you need, but this adaptation isn't quite brainy enough to earn my hearty recommendation.

No offense, Donatello.

Fans of the Turtles franchise have probably seen this plot carried out before: during a freak laboratory accident, a young April O'Neil saves four baby turtles and a rat by dropping them in a sewer. Years later, April (Megan Fox) is now a news reporter hot on the tail of a conspiracy to take over New York City. As she investigates, April crosses paths with her grown-up pets who now act as vigilantes fighting against the evil of Shredder and his private army known as the Foot Clan.

It's pretty standard good-versus-evil stuff, although a handful of action sequences prove to be rather diverting. Late in the film, there's a downhill chase on a snow-covered mountain that shows just how clever and fun these turtles can be outside their usual cityscape.

I've heard lots of complaints about the way the turtles themselves are portrayed this time around. Actually, the filmmakers get the banter between the characters just right. You get a strong sense of brotherhood among these guys, and it's easy to tell they're teenagers with one or two cringe-worthy fart / boner jokes just in case anyone forgot.

The biggest issue is the fact that these "teenage mutant turtles" are about the furthest thing from "ninjas" you could imagine. Mikey, Donnie, Leo and Raph are all enormous brutes who look like they could go toe-to-toe with the Incredible Hulk much less round up puny Foot soldiers in the dead of night. These turtles frequently rely on brute strength to take care of things, hurling trucks at bad guys or punching them across whole rooms. These ain't the TMNT I know from my childhood.

Aside from the decent motion capture and voice work from Johnny Knoxville, Tony Shaloub, Jimmy Howard, Noel Fisher, Pete Ploszek and Alan Ritchson, the human performances are pretty dull. Fox is always nice to look at, but her display of emotion is about as engaging and wooden as a 2x4. Arnett isn't funny as Vern Fenwick, April's cameraman. It's annoying that he just tries to get in her pants the entire time. William Fichtner also stars as the shady businessman Eric Sacks, a role that the actor could play in his sleep.

This Michael Bay production is better than Transformers: Age of Extinction, but there have been so many better blockbusters this summer that this iteration of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is largely worth skipping.

C-