Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows picks up around a year after the brothers saved New York City from the Shredder. The turtles have stayed in the shadows, and are becoming restless in their anonymity. Then, the Shredder is broken out of captivity, and he makes a deal with Krang, an alien commander from a different dimension. Shredder is made to assemble the parts of a device that will open a portal to bring Krang and his weapon the Technodrome to Earth. The turtles team up once again with April O'Neil (Megan Fox) to deal with this threat.
Blockbuster films tend to be accused of being soulless, of being little more than empty showcases of constructed bombast. But movies are inherently a creative medium, and the demands of storytelling often allow a bit of artistry to sneak in. This is inexplicably not the case with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. It is little more than an overlong collection of empty intertextual references with nothing holding them together other than the rote assemblage of action sequences. It is a film that earns the right to be called soulless.
This film is all plot. It is composed of nothing more than a succession of events, none of it contributing in any way to a narrative or a theme or even just a feeling. It's all weightless, the film seemingly leaning on blank recognition to give any substance to what they're putting up on screen. Krang is ostensibly the villain of this piece, but he isn't even present for most of the movie. The film introduces him early on, but makes no effort to establish him as a real threat. Shredder makes the deal with him blindly, as if he just suddenly stopped being a nefarious criminal.
The movie just barrels on, but with strangely little action. The film doesn't even make up for its lack of weight with creative action sequences or big conceptual set pieces. The film ends up spending a lot of time with the human supporting cast, who don't really get to do much that's exciting. Action is scarce in this movie, most of it coming at the end, and much of it taking the form of digital blurs. The movie fills the screen with random bits of data, creating sensory overload without actually putting up anything of real value.
The movie plays at conflict between the brothers, but this is also just rote nonsense. It isn't even always clear what exactly they're fighting a out, and the movie basically just resolves it without actually dealing with any of the feelings involved. Performances are not good, but it's hard to blame anyone. Megan Fox is made to dress up like a sexy schoolgirl at one point in this film, because the filmmakers do seem to really just see her as a piece of meat. And they have to tick off that box on the checklist of what mass market movies are supposed to do. Will Arnett is funny in the scenes that he's in, but he's so much better than what this movie allows.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows moves in completely robotic beats, the movie often just having Donatello spouting some pseudo-scientific nonsense to move things along, the film not caring enough about the viewer to make things feel organic in any way. It just wants to deliver its payload of perfunctory action sequences and franchise-specific references. It offers the bare minimum of what a blockbuster movie can be, leaving absolutely no heart, soul or personality in its digitally constructed wake. This is a movie that feels like an obligation to the filmmakers, everyone involved already looking to leave this behind and do something else.
My Rating:
