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Written by Roger Moore, MCT
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Monday, 19 March 2007 |
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TMNT
2 stars (out of 5)
Cast: The voices of Patrick Stewart, Zhang Ziyi, Mako, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Laurence Fishburne.
Director: Kevin Munroe.
Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes .
Industry rating: PG for animated action violence, some scary cartoon images and mild language.
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They're not really teenagers any more. They still don't look like turtles.
But they still love their pizza, extra cheese, if you please.
And now they're so "cool" that they can title their movie "TMNT," because those film phenoms of 1990, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, are no longer played by guys in foam rubber suits. No, now they're computer-animated guys in rubber suits.
So Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michelangelo look a lot more like Spider-Man as they hurtle through the mean, dark streets of New York.
But "TMNT" is B-O-R-I-N-G.
As pretty as digital rain looks dripping on a digital rubber head swathed with a digital rubber ninja headband, a rubber suit is still a rubber suit. This 3-D animation makes the people look like animated Barbie dolls and the turtles look like plastic toys. This isn't a re-invention of the kiddie comic-book heroes, just animated recycling for another generation.
The dudes, four brothers raised in the sewers of New York by the inscrutable teacher Splinter, a rat who looks like the Cheetos cheetah, and voiced by the late actor Mako, are all split up when "TMNT" opens. One's gone into the jungle to "study" to be a leader. Another's become a stealth crime fighter in a new guise, The Night Watcher. One's in information technology and one entertains at kiddie parties.
There are beasties about, all connected to a legend of an immortal king (Patrick Stewart) and his army of stone-statue generals. April (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the Lara Croft wannabe-turtle pal, and Casey (Chris Evans of "Fantastic Four") need their friends to team back up and give them a hand.
The Foot Clan, their mortal ninja enemies, make an appearance. Zhang Ziyi ("Memoirs of a Geisha") does the voice of their leader. Splinter has more lessons to pass on to the brothers, if they stop fighting each other long enough to listen.
"Let anger consume you and pretty soon, you lose sight of everything."
It has a dreadful "Ghostbusters"-"Stargate" plot, virtually no decent jokes, but toss in a little digital skateboarding, a lot of digital swordfighting (gunplay, too), a couple of "Cowabungas," and you've got yourself a hit. They hope.
It's piffle, yes, piffle loaded with gravity (Laurence Fishburne's stentorian narration). The animation's good, in a Pixar 2.0 sort of way (humans look much better in today's 3-D animated movies).
Maybe your kids will want to learn who the real Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo were. But chances are, they'll only be asking for nunchucks. That's all that happened in 1990, when ninjas were ninjas, turtles were just wise-cracking guys suffocating in foam rubber suits, and you didn't need pizza to know cheese when you smelled it. | Only registered users can write comments.
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