I just caught it tonight; I'm with waggy on this one. I don't mind brainless popcorn movies like Transformers, but I was fairly disappointed with this one. The original live action movies were campy & a LOT of fun, and this was
missing that fun. This is what bugged me the most:
1. It felt like an adult wrote the film, whereas the originals, they were lame and funny and enjoyable and they worked. Go ninja go ninja go ninja go go go!
This tried to do too many Dark Knight-style shots, which would have been fine if they had kept that somewhat seriousness consistent, but it just didn't work for me. Kind of a design-by-committee type of release.
2. It felt like a Hollywood director collaborated with Freddie Wong. Don't get me wrong, I love Freddie, but this whole movie felt like that one Youtube video he did with Jon Favreau:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71YsRO6G7Ks
3. There was like
zero character development. Everything felt really rushed. I think it needed another 30 minutes to really flesh it out. Same with the story...wasn't Sachs already rich? And why does Shredder only want to take over
one city...where the majority of the population would be dead anyway...what's the point? Plus, it felt like it was the "April O'Neil show", not the "Ninja Turtles show." Which would have been fine if they had actually had her do real acting or picked a better actress, but she was very reactive & passive the whole time. The bad ninja Asian lady didn't even get any kind of focus at all.
4. The entire soundtrack sounded like trailer music. Like, everything was SUPER epic. I felt like the music needed to go more into the background a lot of times.
5. The guy who wrote Michelangelo's lines should have been in charge of the entire screenplay. He had some really funny tidbits, but they were just kind of sprinkled here & there.
6. The ADR lipsync was terrible. That's something that bugs me & throws me out of a movie - when I can tell they recorded it after & it just doesn't line up with the picture at all. And it kept happening over and over and over.
I initially didn't want to see it because the turtles looked really,
really weird in the trailer. Creepy-weird & kind of disgusting-weird. Once they got into character in the movie, they were fine, but Splinter was still icky looking. And they tried to make him a bit more relatable by putting a wet nose like a dog on him, but it just didn't work. Like, I think they did a great job with the first Transformers movie...it captured the fun of the original stuff. This fell short, in my mind.
The Screen Junkies video linked above had some excellent points. They should have kept Sachs as Shredder. They should have had Krang or something crazy in it, since everyone already knows the backstory & they have awesome graphics to work with. This movie was just kind of a mess all around. I'm reading through the comments on that video & there are a lot of good suggestions:
1. Emma Stone as April O'neil. I'm not a big fan of hers, but I think she would have fit the role a LOT better than Megan Fox.
2. More characters, especially Casey Jones (Kit Harington, or I'll go out in left field here & suggest Chris Angel), as well as some nods to Bebop & Rocksteady.
3. Replace Will Arnett with Ryan Reynolds or somebody else who isn't creepy-weird.
4. More focus on Michelangelo's lines. "She's a Jeeeeedi" & "Cowabunga!" & his elevator DJ song, haha.
Overall this movie felt like it didn't know what it wanted to be. Like the Screen Junkies said, you can throw up a movie like Guardians, which no one has ever heard of, but have a good story with great characters, and people will wanna watch it. This wasn't a really "fun" movie, like TMNT should have been. I enjoyed "I, Frankenstein" a lot more than this, despite having its own share of issues.
Meh.
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