What a time to be alive - we not only have pizza-eating turtles and warthogs with purple Mohawks, but strangest of all: I think movie producers might be listening to audiences.
In 2014, after Michael Bay's production company, Platinum Dunes, gave us a shallow misfire of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles adaptation, Paramount cleaned house. With a new director, the goal was set: don't anger the fans. I think it's a goal well met.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows comes in the wake of Deadpool, another film that could be considered a studio's apology for the past. And while the critical and box office climate's not looking as favorable for the Turtles, this sequel, like Deadpool, breathes childish (in a good way) life into the franchise.
After the defeat of Shredder (Brian Tee), the Turtles - Leonardo (Pete Ploszek), Raphael (Alan Ritchson), Donatello (Jeremy Howard), and Michelangelo (Noel Fisher) - defend New York City in secrecy. Fighting crime, eating pizza, and watching basketball from Madison Square Garden's scoreboard is a pretty good gig, but the brothers long for acceptance, a day where they can live among the rest of the world.
The peace ends when Shredder breaks out of jail with the help of Baxter Stockman (Tyler Perry), a scientist who teleports Shredder out of a police convoy. Shredder ends up in another dimension, where he meets the villainous Krang (Brad Garrett), a talking brain with a robot body. Krang enlists Shredder to help him build a beacon that will summon an interdimensional weapon of mass destruction. Shredder agrees, and with newly-mutated minions Bebop (Gary Anthony Williams), a warthog, and Rocksteady (pro wrestler Sheamus), a rhino, at his side, works to bring Krang into our dimension, so he and Krang can rule.
When reviewing the first film, I hoped the sequel would be a "playful action powerhouse," and it is. There are extended sequences that see the Turtles zooming through land, sea, and air at breakneck speed. Unlike the first film, the action is easy to make out, and I never got lost.
The movie operates on cartoon logic- if your suspension of disbelief snaps at the sight of a rhino/human hybrid operating a tank, a hockey-masked hero beating ninjas with expertly-fired hockey pucks, or Tyler Perry's felt-like mustache, you won't like this.
However, there's a sincerity to this production that makes me smile. Out of the Shadows embraces a lunacy that hearkens to Saturday mornings - it wouldn't be too far a stretch to imagine Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes watching this with a bowl of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs. Everyone is over-the-top, and to watch Brian Tee dress up in a cheese-grater-meets-samurai costume and scheme about "purple ooze" is the right kind of silly.
Missteps include Stephen Amell's Casey Jones, who's less Punisher and more Robin; and some of the subplots involving Leonardo could be easily avoided if he would get off his archetypal high horse, but I guess all teenagers, even mutant ninja turtles, can be stupid at times.
They've just got to be the right kind of stupid.
Thank you all for reading. I'm the Man Without a Plan, signing off.
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