#70 TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

#70 TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

Starring Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner and some stunt men. Written by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Evan Daugherty. Directed by Jonathan Liebesman, 101 minutes long.

The plot sees New York under attack from a group of evil baddies called the Foot Clan lead by some bloke called Shredder. Luckily there's an urban myth about a group of teenage, mutant, ninja turtles out there to protect us all, an urban myth that hot sexy reporter April O'Neil, as played by Megan Fox - the daughter of a murdered scientist who used to own four pet turtles as a kid is out to prove. Plus there's a millionaire science/buisness man, as played by William Fichtner who used to work with Megan's dead dad but now is helping the police to bring the Foot Clan to justice, if he's not a baddy I'll eat my pet turtle. If this film seems very familiar then that's because it borrows its entire last act from The Amazing Spider Man film, you know the one with the lizard. You know the bit where the lizard decides to poison New York city by spraying the city with a virus from the top of his radio tower built on top of a sky scrapper, well this is the same story, right down to the antidote, and the falling radio tower and just as boring.

 This is a dull and bland movie with nothing new to offer and whose main benefit is that it's not that long, especially if you leave as soon as the credits begin, you'll be out in under an hour and a half. It's a film where the camera never stops, it constantly moves, even when characters are just talking. The turtles aren't played in the brilliantly realised Jim Henson designed turtle suits of the original Turtles film, they're played by pixels, wearing coloured-coded domino masks to help us tell them apart. Don't worry, it doesn't make the blindest bit of difference, you'll never know which of the four turtles are which and frankly it just doesn't matter. There's no jeopardy, no drama, no excitement or anything of any real merit, although there are lots of pixels hitting other pixels, just like Transformers 4, another Michael Bay movie and it just becomes uninteresting. It's impossible to care for the giant 6 foot 4 green turtles, they're invincible and impervious to everything thrown at them. They can ignore the laws of gravity and physics whenever it suits them and can't be hurt by anything. The henchmen are limitless and without motivation, their leader, Shedder becomes another pixel creation dressed in a silver samurai suit and defeats the turtles over and over again until the final fight when he's finally defeated... Or is he? And finally there's Megan, who's not as foxy as she used to be, who is forced to carry the movie and frankly she's just not up to the job. Her relationship with Arnett borders on embarrassing, such is his awful school boy crush, but that's nothing compared to the frankly creepy lusting that one of the turtles does over her. At one point he's pulled off. Yuck.

This is such a generic movie you can literally tick off the tropes from a movie cliche-bingo card.

Please sir, can I not have another?

4/10