You may not believe this, but I wasn’t a wonderful student. No, no. It’s true. Shocking, right? No? You can be a little shocked for me, can’t you? No? Yeah. I deserve that. Once, after a particularly half-assed assignment, I received, well, let’s just say the paper had more red marks than a Bolshevik rally. Red marks, “read Marx,” whatever, ok? Anyway, long story short, I had to redo the assignment, correcting my errors, and when the second iteration was returned, there was simply the phrase, “I see that you’ve corrected the errors, now write a better paper.” And with that note of inspiration, I present Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, a film dead set on making sure it corrected the mistakes of the original without coming near to correcting the biggest one of all.
Let’s start off with the improvements, shall we? Among the myriad problems of film #1 were the following – they hid the turtles until halfway through the film. Out of the Shadows put the turtles on screen in the opening sequence where they leap off the Chrysler Building for shells and scales. It’s ok, they’re doing this at night; none of the estimated 17,000 public surveillance cameras in NYC are
functional in the dark. –And how did they get to the top of the Chrysler Building??– Next, the original TMNT had trouble differentiating among the turtles. It was hard to know or care which reptile was which. Shadows immediately distinguished the four with names and attributes while the quartet all made reckless Spider-Man fun on the way to sneaking into Madison Square Garden. Fellas, you’re really sneaking in while the Knicks are playing? Finally, the original combat sequences were weak, uninventive, often shot-in-the-dark, and one-sided. Shadows improved upon this, too, letting our four heroes take on a jail-break convoy with a souped-up garbage truck with mechanical extend arms and manhole projectiles. Unlike the first, this back-and-forth battle did not have a predictable outcome for most children under the age of seven.
Ok, great. I see the improvement. Now write a better paper.
Look, I didn’t set this up; you did. This premise is potentially ripe for much humor – there are giant humanoid mutant turtles living underneath NYC. As if that weren’t silly enough, the turtles also are martial artists, have the language, maturity and temperament of teenagers, are named after Renaissance artists, and are trained by a talking rat roughly the size and age of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There’s so much of this that could be funny and just … isn’t. Do we ever really talk about their turtle-ness other than appearance? I mean, couldn’t you see the fellas really into Godzilla movies or really lethargic in cold weather (are they cold blooded or warm blooded?) or [their guardian and teacher] 
Splinter being more like the cruel master Pai Mei from Kill Bill, Vol. II? Are Galápagos nature documentaries on giant tortoises considered porn to these guys?
I feel like the producers and writers of these films hit upon the “teenage” part and stopped, insisting that said description accounted for 100% of turtle personality. As a fan of amphibians ahead of reptiles, I applaud this bias, but as a movie fan and parent, I can tell you the most boring –and untrue – thing you can put on film is a teen “acting like a teen.” The screenwriters asked themselves, “huh. What does a teen boy like to do?” And came up with the answers, “jump off buildings”, ”eat pizza”, ”watch basketball,” and things almost entirely along these lines. It takes a great deal of discipline to be a ninja, no? When do the turtles train? Do they study? They live in the sewers; imagine all the things that get flushed down toilets in Manhattan that might hold the interest of a teen boy.
I digress. I digress because for a film in which four giant human turtles, a hot reporter (Megan Fox), and a shamed cop (Stephen Amell) chasing an anthropomorphized rhinoceros (Stephen Farrelly), an anthropomorphized warthog (Gary Anthony Williams), and an evil escaped kung fu master (Brian Tee) taking his orders from an evil-er, condescending, disembodied alien brain, this film holds no secrets. How is that even possible? In fact, for all the uniqueness of players, the plot comes straight from The Avengers. How wonderful; you cared enough to make something derivative.
Tyler Perry also showed up in this one; clearly he felt inadequate, having not appeared in a shitty film in several weeks now. Laura Linney had the envious role of the police chief who gets to be astonished at the discovery that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have come Out of the Shadows. Personally, I was more astonished that Laura Linney was in this film.
Shredder is loosed on New York City again
Taking his cues from some weird alien brain
Ninja turtles are there
So I say, “Beware!
Avoid it all and you’ll be spared the pain.”
Rated PG-13, 112 Minutes
D: Dave Green
W: Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec
Genre: Comic premise, but intended for the humor impaired
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Anybody who says, “COWABUNGA, DUDE!” without a shred of irony
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Folks still reeling from the first
