Thursday, June 16, 2016

Film Review - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)

Splinter taught them to be Ninja Teens (He's a Radical Rat),
Leonardo Leads, Donatello Does Machines,
Raphael is cool but Broods and Michaelangelo is a Party Dude,
But when the Evil Shredder attacks again,
These Turtles Boys must Step up and Fight.

I was very hesitant walking into this film mainly because I did not enjoy the first film from 2014 but seeing the preview for this film made me a little more curious after all it did promise Bebop and Rocksteady from the original cartoon so second time lucky?

Actually I will say yes as I enjoyed this film much more than I enjoyed the first film and the reason I feel this is the cast is due to the much lighter tone this film has than the first film had it felt more like that original cartoon show whereas the first film felt it was honouring more the original black and white comics that inspired all of this (and were very dark in and of themselves) and also I liked Stephen Amell from TV's Arrow as Casey Jones, he was a fun character and he did the best he could with what he had.

And I also liked some of the action sequences particularly one with Bebop and Rocksteady where they have access to a Tank, I thought that was pretty fun.

But there are some big problems with this film sadly:

- The first of those is the complete waste of its villains, Shredder barely did anything in this film especially when the human heroes can't stop talking about him and how dangerous he is and Krang barely had any screen time and in the series both of them were very memorable but here they're just thrown into the mix and then tossed away like they're nothing.

- Secondly the Turtles themselves continue to be huge vacuums of personality like they were in the first film, in the series they were very fun characters that didn't take themselves too seriously and had a nice banter as well as working well as a group whereas here there's still the conflict about being in the group and the serious discussions about that and I just don't care about that, it was fine in the first one but in this one they should've been much more honed as a group similar to the cartoon series.

- And lastly the final battle is a humongous anti climax literally I sat there and thought to myself "Is that It?" after it was over as it felt like it only went for about 5 minutes at the most and it is one of the worst climaxes of a film I've seen in a long time and it's a joke and not a good one.

And so that was Out of the Shadows, a fine enough sequel that fans might get a bit more of a kick out of it but you could probably go through life just fine without seeing it, 2 out of 5.

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