2 stars (out of 5)
The exhausting follow-up to the modern take on TMNT from two years ago, this is sort of a remake of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze (1991) and actually maybe TMNT 6 if you count the original ‘90s movies (if you can be bothered, that is). At any rate, it’s pretty dire and tedious whatever it is, although it’s amusing to remember that the Turtles were originally intended by creators Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman back in the late ‘80s as a subversive satire of superhero comics (specifically Frank Miller’s take on Daredevil), so the joke really is on us after all these years. Ha.
Those talking Turtles Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo and Leonardo (rendered by CG FX and voiced by no one of any special note) are still in hiding under New York despite the fact that they saved the city in the first film, and all the credit for their heroics has gone to Vernon Fenwick (Will Arnett), who’s adoring being a cheesy celebrity. They’re still helped out by April O’Neil (no, not that April O’Neil, and here again played by Megan Fox), and after an endlessly expensive sequence where Shredder (Brian Tee) breaks out of a prison van, the gang must team up with dopey cop Casey Jones (Stephen Amell) to stop his Shredderness doing something even more ludicrously villainous than before.
The Shredster has been rescued by a scientist named Baxter Stockman (Tyler Perry), and he’s somehow responsible for turning a pair of baddies (Stephen Farrelly and Gary Anthony Williams) into a dismally unfunny rhino-man and warthog-man, and there’s also some kind of alternate dimension where a cranky squiddy-alien-thingie called Krang (voiced by Brad Garrett) plans to take over the world again, or something. Oh, and there’s some pink goo in there that could possibly turn the TMNT into humans, and when they argue cringingly over the Turtlesque scientific ethics of using the stuff you’ll want to scream.
While crammed with everything director Dave Green, producer Michael Bay and Co think audiences will love (the much-ogled Fox done up as a schoolgirl, sensei rat Splinter knocking off one-liners, lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of explosions), and all on a budget that could pay off America’s foreign debt, this should still prove ghastly for anyone over 10. And it’s already proven a box-office flop, which rather suggests that the end is finally nigh for those TMNT, and chances are that after sitting through this one you’ll be wanting to put them all out of their misery yourself.
I Wake Up Screening 