Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Movie Review

This review is kinda’ ridiculous because I love TMNT and I just wanted to talk about how awesome the movie is. There will be very little constructive criticism here. This movie rocks! The movie poster above is the first I ever owned and was on my wall until I was in my twenties.

To get a good perspective though, you have to place yourself at the beginning of the nineties and the fever pitch of love that kids had for The Turtles was at a breaking point. It can’t be paralleled with anything else today except maybe tweens and Twilight.

It was that crazy.

I loved the Turtles. Loved them. I had all their action figures, played the video games, watched the shows, and even dressed up like them for Halloween. No T.V. show was able to ingrain itself so well into a generation of kids.

Sadly, I can’t remember seeing this movie in the theater. I was too young at the time I guess. It came out when I was four, so I only remember seeing the second one. Moreover, TMNT is the best Turtles movie ever made. It is something no one could have expected: It was dark and stylish.

The movie opens with April being accosted by a group of thugs and a Sai flies out and smashes the lights. The place goes dark and everyone is like, “Holy shit, its the turtles I want to fucking see The Turtles!”

But nope. All you see is one of the Turtles, Raphael, poke his head out of the sewer. You only get a small glimpse. Then the music kicks up in the sewer and you see the Turtles’ shadows and the camera freezes and the title screen comes on. All the kids were like, “Oh my god, let me see the fucking turtles!”. Then they jump out. It is, and was, perfect.

The turtles look great as well. I mean, they look fabulous! Puppetry and design at its best. It is proof that puppetry will reign supreme over CG until CG catches up. Because, in my opinion, the Turtles look real. The creatures in Avatar look like cartoons. But that is just my opinion…

The story is also really good. It explains the Turtles’ origin and has Shredder as scary as we always thought he was. Raphael takes center stage in this movie, which is unusual because everyone loved Mikey and Leo the most.

Raphael is stubborn and rebellious. He curses and is reckless. He parallels the angry younger teenagers that he ends up fighting in the foot clan. It is pretty decent writing. It also follows Joseph Cambell’s heroes journey almost point-by-point.

The film follows the Turtles as they try to get Shredder back from the Foot Clan. They are attacked by the Foot and Raphael is almost killed. There is actually a pretty touching scene where Leo is sitting with him in the tub. People who didn’t watch the show might not understand this, but to Turtle fans they might as well have been real. These characters meant a lot to us and when the Turtles were sad, we were sad too.

The fights are also fantastic. The suits don’t restrict great fight choreography as they might have. The fights are intense, but never enough where kids would think what they were seeing was real or that The Turtles were purposefully violent in any way. They crack jokes and do funny fighting tricks throughout these scenes. Also, notice whenever Leonardo gets in a fight he always loses his swords or uses them in a creative way so he doesn’t end up cutting people in half. The Foot Clan in the cartoon were robots, but apparently this would just be too hard to do with special effects.

By the way, I didn’t check the credits, but I’m pretty sure one of the kid’s in Shredder’s gang is young Sam Rockwell…I could be wrong.

The last fight scene is sublime. The Foot Clan try to ambush the Turtles, but they are ready. The fight spills onto the street and Donny and Michelangelo crack jokes back and forth. Jokes such as, “Boy, I guess we can really shell it out!” Fucking classic.

Shredder shows up, but they can’t beat him, and Splinter has to clean up the mess. This movie is so awesome! They even wait to the end to unleash the Turtle’s most famous catchphrase, Cowabunga!. I can’t even imagine the irruption it must have been when kids first heard that. Everyone had been waiting for it, “When are they going to say it!?” Then the movie ends with, so cool.

No Turtle movie has ever come close to being as good and never will. It was a strange anomaly that a movie decided to focus on the Turtles and not the humans. The second movie was really good, but was more jokey and had less fighting scenes. Kano was also a weird addition, it worked, but was unnecessary.

Some day they will bring back a live-action version of the Turtles and they’ll be smart if they watch the first film for inspiration, but also include such fan favorites as Krang or Bebop and Rocksteady. Studios would be smart to make a new version. This series’ fans are still out there. We’re just older and want something better than the computer-animated versions.

A/5

-Collin