Maybe if I were ten years old I would have enjoyed the film more.
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When the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles furor hit the world in the mid 1980s, I was already entering middle age and generally immune to juvenile fads. Not that I could entirely avoid the craze, however, what with the comic books, the cartoon series, the 1990 live-action film, and the merchandizing of a gazillion different items from action toys to breakfast cereal. Still, I've always had a hard time understanding the TMNT phenomenon, the whole concept being too silly for me, even as a parody of superheroes; and this popular, 2007 CGI-animated movie didn't do much to persuade me otherwise.
In the event you hadn't heard about the Turtles before, a narrator (Laurence Fishburne, who has very little to do after the initial introduction) tells who (or what) they are: "Four brothers genetically reborn in the sewers of New York, named after great Renaissance masters and trained as ninjas." After that, the film tells us that the crime-fighting quartet has broken up, further reminds us who each character is, and explains what each Turtle is currently doing.
Leonardo (voiced by James Arnold Taylor) is supposedly the leader of the outfit, but he's in Central America, living by himself in the jungle, still seeking out evildoers, and learning to be a better leader. Donatello (Michael Whitfield) is the brains of the outfit, but he's now working nine-to-five as a call-in computer tech. Michelangelo (Mikey Kelley) is the easygoing, wisecracking Turtle, and he's now entertaining at children's birthday parties. And Raphael (Nolan North) is the tempestuous, pessimistic rebel with the rogue attitude, who has donned a new outfit and is secretly fighting crime as the "Night Watcher."
In addition, there are two humans, a boyfriend and girlfriend, who act as the Turtles' allies, Casey Jones (Chris Evans) and April O'Neil (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Casey is a klutzy superhero who wears a hockey mask and wields a baseball bat among other things to fight baddies. April is kind of a female Indiana Jones, an explorer and anthropologist. It is she who goes to Central America to find some ancient statues for a multimillionaire, Max Winters (Patrick Stewart), and not only brings back the statues but runs across Michelangelo as well and persuades him to come home.
But those are not all the characters. There is also Master Splinter (voiced by Mako, the legendary Japanese actor in his final role), a giant, mutant rat, wise in the ways of the ninja and the martial arts and so on, a mentor and father figure to the Turtles, sort of like Master Po and Master Kan in the old "Kung Fu" television series. Then, there is Karai (Ziyi Zhang), the shadowy boss of another group of ninjas, whose team Max Winters hires to patrol his premises. Oh, and Kevin Smith voices a diner.
Understand, this is only an eighty-seven minute movie. With all these characters milling about, with our need to learn something of their back story, and with a good deal of effort spent on regrouping the old Turtle team, there is not a lot of time left over for an actual plot. Well, the film scored well enough at the box office that maybe the filmmakers are planning a sequel where something actually happens.
What little story line there is concerns the machinations of Max Winters (I'm sure the filmmakers derived the name from Daphne du Maurier's character Max De Winter in "Rebecca" and based his appearance on "Mr. Incredible"). Anyway, Winters attempts to round up all the monsters that a confluence of stars loosed upon the world in ancient times. For what nefarious purpose, I'll leave to you to find out.
The problem is, "TMNT" never takes off. Despite all the voice talent, the movie doesn't have much personality, spark, or energy. Even the action scenes are lackluster. With so many characters, nobody gets his due, and the plot, which takes a considerably long time getting started, finally gets lost in the minutiae. Moreover, there is no clearly definable central villain, either, or maybe too many villains, the vagary of which results in our losing interest in anything but the CGI imagery.
Then, there's the matter of the spoofing. I recall the original Ninja Turtles being a kind of send-up of superheroes, but this time there is no real spoofing going on, no satire or parody that I noticed. The movie seems more like a straightforward superhero action flick, which makes the entire enterprise even cornier than I remember it. What small attempts at humor the movie provides are too casual or too obvious to be very funny, including the inevitable children's burp gag.
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[release]21422[/release]