Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows

I was not a fan of the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle film, not one bit. I actually despised it. As a TMNT fan for most of my life, not a fanatic, but I do have a very specific idea of what TMNT should be, As a kid who grew up favoring the original black and white Mirage comics which featured a grittier and violent take on the Turtles, I appreciated the original 1990 film. It borrowed greatly from the Mirage comics storyline while combining it pretty flawlessly with the cartoon's humorous sensibility. The result was a film that had a gritty real world feel and story with heart that also was able to appeal to the masses and kids who made TMNT a household name.  To this day, it still has a certain charm that will be hard to capture in this age of polished CGI. I have come to the realization some time ago that that 1990 film is the closest I will get to my perfect TMNT movie. It was by no means perfect, but for the most part it gave me everything I wanted out of a Ninja Turtle movie. Which brings us to this new series of Turtle films. 

I could write a laundry list of my problems with the 2014 TMNT reboot. I won't bother with that here but I will say that aside from the giant Turtle designs being less than stellar and making their Ninja capabilities kind of unnecessary, I completely loathed everything about the story and script. From Splinter and Shredder's non existent history with one another, to the silly inclusion that the Turtles were actually April's pets whom she named. The film failed on so many levels for me, topping it off was the fact that it completely rips off the climax of 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man film with NYC being threatened with a toxin being launched from a skyscraper. So yeah, they got the Turtle's characterizations right, but not much else in my book. Even for being marketed more towards kids, I felt it was unbelievably dumb and sells children short. Just because it's "for kids" doesn't mean it has to feel as if it was written by one. I have softened my stance on it just a bit having rewatched it while writing this review, but not enough to consider it a TMNT film I ever wanted to exist. Fast forward to 2016 and the trailer was revealed for Out of the Shadows and I said to myself  "Looks more fun than the last one." Which is exactly what I hoped for when I sat down in the theater last night. 

The first thing I will say here is that if you ARE going to see TMNT Out of the Shadows, do yourself a favor and see it in 3D. This is the type of movie that benefits greatly from the format, much in the same way The Jungle Book did. TMNT opens up with a visually eye catching and fun scene of the Turtles descending from atop the Chrysler building (though not sure why they needed to be up THAT high, they aren't Spider-Man after all) and there are many more scenes that are indeed a visual treat. It still has that slick look of a Michael Bay production, but I felt the set pieces were better realized than in the first film, which lead to me enjoying them more. The direction here was better too in most cases. 

The Turtles are finally the stars in this film, most of the other characters old and new take a backseat and it is definitely for the better. Leo, Raph, Mikey and Donny all take up the bulk of the dialogue and have much more to do here than in the first film. Leo gets to be Leo the conflicted leader, Donny has somehow attained a Tony Stark level of intellect and gadgetry. Raph is once again the tough guy enforcer and Michelangelo steals the show here as he did in the previous film. In the first I was kind of just along for the ride and didn't really connect with the Turtles as THE Ninja Turtles, here though I felt more like I was rooting for them. Megan Fox is back as April O'Neil and is tasked with delivering exposition and looking really good doing so. I think Megan Fox gets a bad rap and works well in comedic roles actually, but she is given very little to work with here, thanks to a poor script. A recasted Shredder is back as well, and he does not do much worth a damn in the film besides bark a few orders, though his updated more traditional Shredder design and new actor are a marked improvement over the previous robotic incarnation so that was a plus. Will Arnett also returns to deliver some of the more effective comic relief. Splinter who was my least favorite aspect of the previous film, still doesn't really do much for me, and pales in comparison to Jim Henson's wonderful version which will forever be my favorite. Sorry. At least he takes a backseat here as well.

Megan Fox in her casual wear...

As for the new characters that had everyone excited for this film, the TMNT villain mainstays Bebop and Rocksteady finally make their big screen appearance, looking just as if they stepped out of the cartoon, which should delight many fans, however while their appearance is spot on for the most part, I found them to be the most obnoxious and cringe worthy characters in the film. I felt as if every word out of their mouth was just a poor attempt at humor and every time they dropped a one liner it was met with a collective hush over the crowd. I honestly do not remember these guys that well from the cartoon, but they could not have possibly been this corny even then. It is a shame, because they do look so cool and they are involved in a majorly fun sequence with the Turtles, but even that is short lived as it is not the turtles who have the final confrontation with them, that is tasked to the other new character, fan favorite Casey Jones. Many Ninja Turtle fans will tell you that there is ONE Casey Jones, Elias Koteas who played him to near perfection in the original 1990 film. In Out of the Shadows, we are treated to a piss poor rendition of the character, played by a horribly miscast Stephen Amell. Not only did you buy Koteas's Jones as a street wise tough guy who could actually hold his own, but he actually had a real personality too. Not that this script does Amell any favors, but whatever he was selling, I wasn't buying it. The film would have been better off without him and you could easily have excised him from the plot and it would make very little difference. Lastly we have Tyler Perry as Baxter Stockman, the less said about him the better.

There is one new character I left out and he is the one I was most excited to see on screen, much of the main and extremely thin plot revolves around Krang. The alien brain creature from Dimension X. What we get here is a fun and faithful version of him that I truly enjoyed whenever he was on screen. Very mild spoilers here that you could surmise from the trailers, but Krang wishes to open an inter-dimensional rift to invade earth and take over, but to do so, he needs to recover three pieces of Dimension-X tech scattered around the globe, he tasks Shredder with the job, and Shredder just says okay cool. This invasion scene (as seen in the trailers) resulted in chuckles from those in my group as everyone started saying "Oh it's Avengers all over again" since once again they are essentially taking another film's climax and repurposing it for their own use. Hell, they even repurposed their own previous films climax having the Turtles face off with their enemy high above the city while time runs out. It was funny and kind of eye roll inducing in that sense, but it was still quite entertaining to see them go up against Krang to be honest. 

Out of the Shadows is an improvement on the previous entry and an entertaining popcorn film. I know much of this review sounds negative, but that is only because I am not wanting to spoil many of the cool or fun scenes in the film. Out of the Shadows should honestly make many Turtle fans happy and in many ways is like a big screen version of the cartoon come to life. I can appreciate the fact that they went that route and seemed to want to correct some problems that people didn't care for in the first one. Their outfits are less busy and I could be wrong but it seemed at times that they scaled down there size a bit too. They gave us more cartoon accurate villains and the Foot Clan are now appropriately Ninja's and not military guys with dumb masks (who's idea was that anyway?) The Turtles themselves are as previously stated the stars and they carry the film, this is something that is to be commended as it is something absent from Michael Bay's other franchise Transformers, where the uninteresting and lame human characters take center stage over the actual characters people pay to see. The Turtle's personalities shine here and it is undoubtedly fun to watch. 

The fact that the script itself feels as if it was written by 12 year olds and it lacks the heart and stakes found within that original 1990 TMNT film leaves Out of the Shadows feeling a bit shallow and unimportant in the grand scheme of Ninja Turtle legacy. Still I would certainly recommend checking it out, especially if you were a fan of the last one or the Turtles in general. I am hard to please when it comes to the Turtles, but I am also not the intended audience for this one. Just go in, turn your brain off and enjoy the spectacle and silliness of it all.