Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie review: Another trip to the sewer

Cast: Megan Fox, Noel Fisher, Jeremy Howard, Pete Ploszek, Alan Ritchson
Director: David Green

It may be declared: if the leads of a blockbuster (read: a sequel, a franchise entry) are on a plane, they aren’t on it to merely travel, like all the others — instead, they must scourge its layout for camouflaged terrorists, use it to conduct a daring mid-air abduction or in the case of those lacking imagination, employ it as a platform to make a thrilling chute-aided jump from. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, the turtles are on a rudimentary plane ride from one place to another. Soon they realise the enemy they hope to interrupt at their destination is already on the plane back home.

One of them pulls out a homing device and calculates that — coincidences of all coincidences — the planes will cross at a distance of 3,000 feet. They decide, for the film is not very rich in imagination, to use their own vehicle as a platform to make a thrilling chute-aided jump from. Soon they land onto another plane, there is a mid-air brawl, which causes the enemy plane to crash into a river below. Almost inevitably, they are soon at the cusp of a steep waterfall.

They descend without injury, only to find themselves engaged in yet another brawl when this sequence of amusements (all devoid of any real danger) finally comes to a close. Only for a bit though, before another chase ensues. In Out of the Shadows, the plot is merely a clever ruse, the pretext for a thousand thrills. Still there is a semblance of it: Shredder, the series’ main antagonist and the evil leftover of the first film, is being escorted to a prison for permanent incarceration.

The advance of the police convoy is however disrupted by rogue rescuers who seem to have no real plan, merely a lot of intent. The turtles land on the spot to save the day, but cannot (they fail at most of their chosen missions in the film, no doubt heroic) because Shredder seems to jump straight into a time-warp that opens into another dimension. The engineer of this radical technology is Baxter Stockman, an incredible physicist, compulsive nerd, attracted naturally to evil (a most interesting character — completely wasted).

However, Stockman can no longer trace Shredder, who has disappeared in his inter-dimensional travel. We discover soon that he has been abducted to a new dimension by alien Krang (this is a useful strategy in a film with no real regards for narrative progression, coherence or chronology), who seeks his assistance in the conduct of an extraterrestrial invasion of New York City, which will enable them later to “rule the world”.

The turtles soon get invested in the situation; there is notional nonsensical science, more brawls, exciting chases, some bargaining with the authorities, a couple of scenes of simulated, tiresome emotion and finally, a big showdown, triumph, the announcement of a sequel. Throughout the film, the turtles exist merely as instruments of action (they climb, jump, run, kick and punch) but not as true, emotional beings.

There is a brief crisis: the turtles struggle with their anonymity, with the lack of recognition for their contributions to the city (this is a running theme: another character recognised as a hero must first earn it, another must earn recognition as a hero he believes he is). This is triggered by their desire to evolve from their subterranean existence, live as normal, functional human beings in a society that does not think of them as monsters.

It leads to a moment of rupture within the group — a genuinely interesting possibility — but soon, they are made to sweep this aside and embrace their essential nature as heroes with a larger, more significant purpose (which, I suppose, is the continuation of the movie franchise). As a result, the turtles come across eventually like oddly tragic figures who live out a dire existence — for they are not supposed to choose to live in any manner other than what is demanded of them by their borderline-parasitic human benefactors. Therefore, even as Ralph declares at the end, “Who wants to live a normal life?” one feels he is doing it under coercion, with two of his three fingers crossed beneath the frame.

The writer is programmer, Lightcube Film Society