We begrudgingly check back in with our heroes in a halfshell to find that Michael Bay and company are leaning hard on the 90s cartoon.
Saying this movie is better than the first isn’t saying much. But it is. And that’s about all it has going for it in a summer overloaded with blockbusters.
Out of the Shadows is the second of the Michael Bay produced movies to feature the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters. In addition to April O’Neil, Shredder, Splinter, and the titular characters, Rocksteady, Bebop, Baxter Stockman, Krang, and Casey Jones have all been added to the roster. The core of the story is Shredder and his crew trying to help Krang bring the Technodrome to Earth as part of a plan to rule it.
At this point, Bay and company are leaning on the 90s cartoon hard for inspiration in addition to a bit from the comics.
The addition of Stephen ‘Green Arrow’ Amell to the cast as Casey Jones is a welcome one. On Arrow, Amell plays the dark and brooding lead character. In this movie, his iteration of Casey Jones is a little more light-hearted and quite a bit different from Green Arrow. It works. Though he doesn’t wear the hockey mask anywhere near enough.
And then there’s Baxter Stockman, scientist and ally to Shredder. He’s played by Tyler Perry. Yes, that Tyler Perry. I didn’t recognize him in the trailers and it took me a few moments to realize who was playing Stockman. But you have to give credit where credit is due on this one and give props to Perry for playing the mad scientist well.
After those two bright spots, this movie is a bit of a s@#T show.
The story is pretty straightforward. Stop the bad guys, save the world. There’s nothing wrong with that as that plot pretty much describes most comic book based films. But a significant portion of the characters telling the story are mediocre CGI.
Michelangelo. Donatello. Raphael. Leonardo. Splinter. Krang. Rocksteady. Bebop.
All of these key characters are CGI, except for the small portion at the beginning before Rocksteady and Bebop are transformed and are still human. There are scenes where Megan Fox is the only actual person on the screen. There are entire scenes that are 100% CGI, without a single live human in sight. And there are scenes where the CGI is just off. It honestly looks a little sloppy at times. The characters are hard to connect to because the just don’t look realistic. The costumes of the 90s films looked significantly better.
Then there’s the origin of Rocksteady and Bebop. In the film, Shredder gets gives the pair a chemical provided by Krang that transforms them respectively into an anthropomorphic rhino and warthog. But there are no DNA samples for either animal in the mix. To paraphrase the explanation that Stockman gives, each subject is reverting to the DNA markers left in their makeup from their ancestral species.
Uh…what?
So, basically this movie is claiming that people evolved from rhinos and warthogs. Or at least that some people did. I’m going to go out on limb and say THAT IS NOT A THING. This is, of course, a fictional story and anything is possible but plot points have to make sense inside this world. This does not make sense. There is no alternate history for how human life evolved in this world.
A brain with a face in the stomach of a robot? That I can accept.
A rat teaching turtles ninjitsu? Sure.
The concept that humans evolved from a variety of animals? Yeah, not so much. Krang and Shredder are just lucky their thugs used to be a rhino and a warthog. What if their ancestors had been a vole and a chihuahua? Scary stuff.
The other big disappointment is how small a role Shredder and Krang actually play. Shredder gets a small amount of screen time and uses it primarily to direct traffic. He personally does very little. The same is true of Krang, though he at least gets a fight scene with the Turtles.
The partnership between Shredder and Krang in this movie is a strange one, though it’s a core part of the animated series. Krang essentially kidnaps Shredder and asks for his help in bringing the Technodrome to Earth so they can conquer it as a team. Shredder is completely unphased by the existence of both alien life and other dimensions, and is almost unbelievably eager to side with a brain with a face in the stomach of a robot. For a hardened criminal, Shredder is surprisingly trusting. He dives in head first with almost zero questions.
Oh, and the Turtles ride around in garbage truck that shoots manhole covers and has giant mechanical arms that swing nunchucks.
Out of the Shadows has some decent action and some genuinely funny moments, thanks in large part to Will Arnett. If you turn your brain right off and just let the movie wash over you, there’s a real shot you could just enjoy it as a relatively serviceable summer blockbuster.
It’s also one of those films that comes apart pretty quickly when you start pulling at loose threads. And there are more than a few of those.
But it is, for whatever this is worth, better than the first movie.