This movie happens to be way better than one might expect. At least in the first half. For nearly twenty minutes we don’t even see the turtles once, and that happens to be. good thing. It’s all setup. The movie takes its time as we follow April O’Neal (the real star of this movie,) played by Meghan Fox. She’s an investigative reporter trying to track down a story. And the way the movie hides the turtles from us in the shadows during multiple attacks (first on the docks at night, then another on a subway platform,) is terrific. It takes on the mentality of Jaws, where the less we see, the cooler we visualize it in our heads.
The human characters here are all pretty solid. There’s not only O’Neal, but also her camera man Vern (played by Will Arnet) and the tech company CEO that she’s investigating, (Saks, played by William Fichtner.) The humor here, among the human characters works. It’s nothing great, but it’s just funny enough. Like the new report April is doing at the start of the film about a gym trainer who is teaching his students to exercise like birds because “there are no fat birds.”
The story behind how the turtles came to be works. This is a new take on it here, very different from what we’ve gotten in the past, and involves two scientists in a lab, trying to create a cure all (sort of like a super serum from the Captain America movies,) and testing it on four turtles and a rat. They put color dots on the turtles backs to tell them apart. One of these scientists is Saks and the other is April’s father.
The problems start coming when we see the Shredder in full armor form and watch the turtles in action. The characters are CGI, but they are done with real actors and motion capture, much like what was done by Andy Serkis in The Lord of the Rings movies (he played Gollum,) or the new Planet of the Apes films. It works for the movement of the turtles, but the action itself is clearly just computer effects. It leads to some cool things that could never really happen, but also some pretty ridiculous ones. And the more we see it, the more we get numb to it. We stop caring, since the stakes are so low. For example, the Shredder flings knives at these turtles over and over again, and not once does a single one of them get hit by the knives.
Speaking of the Shredder, he is by far the weakest part of this movie. Instead of being a man with a cool costume, here he is like a giant CGI samurai robot. He’s basically the Silver Samurai from the end of The Wolverine. Only, honestly, that character looked even cooler than this one. Michael Bay produced this movie and his contribution is never felt more than when looking or listening to the Shredder speak. The character seems like he’s right out of those Transformer movies Bay directed, complete with a voice that sounds like the booming robotic tone of Optimus Prime. If the CGI of the turtles in action didn’t take you out of it, than any fight scene involving the Shredder certainly does.
It’ unfortunate that the second half of this movie is so dopey, because the first half was so good. In many ways, this incarnation of the turtles feels like Zack Snyder’s DC movies. That is to say the look of it is great, the action is a plenty, but the CGI work is just way too in your face and over the top. The tone of the movie and story work (although the villain’s plot, involving poisoning the water supply reeks of the same kind of stupidity as the Amazing Spider Man’s Lizard trying to turn all New York citizens into lizards.) But until that villainous plot is revealed, the secrecy of the villains and way that two of them are connected to each other are pretty cool. The movie never completely falls apart, but it sure does lose a lot of steam in the second half. Especially when you consider that the first half was just so good.