It was a shell of good time!

We made it to another Casual Friday folks, and that means movie reviews. Going to try not to be biased on this one and give you my thoughts on the newly released remake of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

First, let me allow my inner child to come out and rant for a bit and say man, I’ve missed the turtles. I’ve been following this movie since the first bit of news came out maybe two and half years ago (maybe further). The turtles are near and dear to me and the 80s cartoon show was my life. Had a LOT of the merchandise. Got me through a lot and I’m more than excited for this movie. Ok, now back to the review. The unbiased review (sigh).

TMNT is a movie built for the kiddies, but has adults and fans in mind with a lot of the references and design. Overall this movie was a lot of fun, and you can see a lot of the influence of Michael Bay in the direction of this film (even though he was only credited as a producer). The inclusion of the Michael Bay team was definitely appropriate for this kind of film. It allowed for some dynamic action sequences that really showed off the ability of the Turtles.

What I liked about the movie was the fact that the abilities of the turtles are pushed to the limits making them legit superhuman entities. This was something that wasn’t really apparent in the 90s movies and 80s cartoon other than the fact that they survived every battle. Now, however the turtles have augmented strength, agility, and endurance that make you see the effects of the mutagen ooze pushed to it’s fullest extent.

The faces of the actors themselves are used to create the turtles. With technology at the level that it is now, you can see it’s influence changing the scope of what can be done in cinema. Motion capture is now augmented with facial capture and actors now get to add their stamp on CGI characters in a way that they couldn’t before.

Noel Fisher does a phenomenal job as Michelangelo. He brings a level of humor to the role that really never allows us to take the movie too seriously and I like that. The turtles were always about fun (after all it started off as a parody of other comics), and it was good on the writer/director team to keep it grounded this way. Noel manages to embody Michelangelo in a way that doesn’t over-exaggerate the role and allows us to have a good time.

Alan Ritchson plays the role of Raphael, and brings every bit of the brooding bad boy turtle to the screen. As most depictions of Raphael, he is the rowdy New York dude, and Ritchson brings every bit of that through (definitely a change from his role in the Hunger Games). Although, I couldn’t help but feel at times though that he sounded a bit like Channing Tatum (…).

Jeremy Howard plays the role of Donatello. Honestly, this was great casting in the fact that Howard tends to get type cast as the social pariah and nerd in a lot of his work. Donatello has always been the character that sort of broke that mold, however, being the techie nerd of the group but still comfortable in his own skin which I think Howard was able to execute well albeit not so difficult for him.

Leonardo and splinter were played by two sets of actors: two for the motion capture and two for the voices. For Leonardo, Pete Ploszek does the mocap while Johnny Knoxville lends his voice. Leonardo has always been the most interesting of characters because he’s the leader and does his best for his family, but in this film he was the most boring.Johnny Knoxville wasn’t special in the role, and it was kind of sad.

Master splinter was played by Danny woodburn, and voiced by Tony Shalhoub. Shalhoub surprisingly did an excellent job as splinter. I’ve always been a fan of his work.

Other than that, I thought the other characters weren’t as prominent as the turtles and as pivotal as April O’Neil was to the story I thought Megan Fox could have done better, but she did do a decent enough job to keep the story going. Her role here was very reminiscent of her role in the first Transformers. Being a fan of the franchise doesn’t necessarily make you the best choice for an actor in that world. Will Arnett played his role efficiently bring comedy when needed. William Fichtner always plays a decent villain and did so well here.

Surprisingly enough, I like the new version of shredder. The armor and all the blades rock. I know have an issue but C’mon… he’s called The Shredder. The suit looks very appropriate.

Some of the things I didn’t like in the movie may have been minor details in the back story. Not having that fundamental conflict between Shredder and Splinter does eliminate a lot of back story that they could visit. Here’s the thing though, even though they didn’t specifically mention it doesn’t mean that they can’t reference that section of back story later in a sequel. I would have also like to have seen Baxter Stockman played up a little more, but as I said it can be approached in a sequel. It’s obvious that a sequel is coming for this movie. The amount of families that I saw in this theater was amazing families of 5+ children. Yeah there’s definitely a sequel coming.

This is definitely a film the whole family will enjoy. I wouldn’t pay for the 3D of this one though, because it wasn’t appropriately utilized in the shooting. Grown fans, you may want to wait this out unless your die hard like I am, but if you have some kids who want to see this take them, they’ll thank you.