TMNT | Film Review | Slant Magazine

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

TMNT *½

by Ed Gonzalez on March 18, 2007 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

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Given the already impossibly low standards of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, the worthlessness of this new CGI adventure isn't surprising. The ridiculous story seems to pick off where no movie before it ever left off: Somewhere in Central America (shot mostly in the sort of hoary overheads familiar from so many Tony Scott and Michael Bay pictures), April O'Neil (Sarah Michelle Gellar) discovers Leonardo (James Arnold Taylor) living in exile, either trying to be a better leader or looking for a whip to beat himself with a la Paul Bettany's Silas from The Da Vinci Code. Poor dude. He seems to be hurting, but not as much as his bros, who are still living in New York City with Splinter (Mako), working odd jobs to pass the time until Leo returns: Donatello (Mitchell Whitfield) does freelance tech support from home and Michelangelo (Mikey Kelley) works birthday parties in a turtle suit while a perpetually enraged Raphael (Nolan North) tries to save the city from crime, in disguise. With The Shredder out of the picture, a new nemesis is introduced via some lame 3,000-year-old flashback about stone soldiers and monsters that instantly thrusts the film into a well of incoherence. If the monsters, which the powerful Max Winters (Patrick Stewart) has been trying to find with the help of the Foot Clan and the story's resuscitated stone soldiers, have been wreaking havoc on the earth for three millennia, why is this the first time anyone has heard anything about them? More importantly, why are they all chillin' in the Big Apple? Impersonally animated and arbitrarily plotted, the story appears to have been made up as the filmmakers went along. A personal entanglement between Leonardo and Raphael is the story's idea of gravitas, but Leonardo is completely let off the hook for his brash outburst that he is "better" than his brother. Of course, by then, you'll have stopped caring and started to wonder, "Dude, where's the pizza?"

Director(s): Kevin Munroe
Screenplay: Kevin Munroe
Cast: Chris Evans, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mako, Kevin Smith, Patrick Stewart, Laurence Fishburne, Ziyi Zhang, Mitchell Whitfield, James Arnold Taylor, Mikey Kelley, Noah North
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Runtime: 85 min.
Rating: PG
Year: 2007