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In the adult world, there are two types of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans. The first exercises nostalgia for their old toys in the same way trashy Chinese restaurants use MSG, their memories making better a mediocre set of toys. Those people are blissfully unconcerned with plot, they just wanna watch their toys smack together. Those people are ok.
The second group pines for a darker, grittier, Christopher Nolan-y reboot. They want a throwback to Eastman & Laird's ultraviolent black-and-white source comic, which was largely ignored when big business realized that turtles can eat pizza and shit out dollars. Those people are dickheads.
The former group will delight in Out of the Shadows, a sloppy, unapologetically campy trip to Michael Bay's multi-million-dollar sandbox. There, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo rampage around the world trying to stop interdimensional monster Krang, a talking alien brain that cruises around in a robot's stomach and is voiced by Brad Garrett. He's aided by Tyler Perry as a sniveling mad scientist who makes Jim Carrey's performance in Batman Forever seem like Heath Ledger's in The Dark Knight, and is also instrumental in getting nerds to cream their pants when punk-rock mutants Bebop and Rocksteady (a warthog and a rhino) start smashing shit and driving tanks. Oh, and Shredder—the big bad of the series, a walking Cuisinart with a hard-on for killing reptiles—is also there, sometimes.
There's a lot going on here. It doesn't matter.
The humans, of course, are just there to kind of react to the photorealistic monsters. Megan Fox returns as reporter April O'Neil, the turtles' bestie who uses her reporterly reporter skills to do reporter stuff and also track bad guys (she also feels compelled to change into a naughty schoolgirl outfit, out of a naughty nerd outfit, probably because the film is by Michael Bay). Will Arnett returns as April's cameraman, a doofus credited with saving the world last time to help the turtles stay hiding. Stephen Amell is fan-favorite hockey-mask vigilante Casey Jones and Laura Linney shows up for prestige/a paycheck.
Again, none of this matters. This is a Michael Bay movie, and not even one he directed. This one was done by Earth to Echo's Dave Green, who does his best Bay impression. He checks off all the marks—exploiting Fox's exposed abs, slow-mo explosions, circling camera around mid-action heroes—and adds enough flourishes to make it flow. Then he stages a series of action scenes cribbed from better movies—starting with a Fast & Furious-style car heist and ending with a Mad Libs take on the end of The Avengers' New York alien invasion—that would be pretty annoying if they didn't look so…competent? There's even a show-stopping centerpiece that starts in a plan and ends in a South American river (and involves a rhino-driven tank, for fuck's sake) that borders on great, but can't quuuuite get there. Basically, everything good comes with something bad.
This is a Ninja Turtles movie. It's what it needs to be. The characters—especially the heroes—are grating as hell, but look great. The action is messy, but also kind of surreal. This is, after all, a movie about man-sized turtles fighting ninjas, a rhino, a big-ass alien brain and robots. Somebody threw all these toys in a big-ass sandbox and let grown children go nuts. For the most part, they seemed to have had fun. Kids will too. Unless they're the grown up kind that's looking for a darker take on a movie adaptation about toys.
There's Transformers for that.
Critic's Grade: C
Willamette Week
