Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the shadows

Cast: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, Laura Linney, Stephen Amell, Brian Tee

Rated: 5/10

Marvel has been the centrepiece this year with a trail of comic book heroes visiting Hollywood ever since Deadpool made his debut last year. This one, again from the Marvel closet in quick succession of the much bigger heroes flying around the screen just the other week, is not that much of a marvel as you may have expected from these shadowy monster warriors of New York city.

Another matter though, that these ninja turtles hate being seen as monsters and are almost bereft of cohesion as a team once the opportunity to look like humans presents itself at their doorstep. But there’s a mission at hand after a high end criminal is freed by a misplaced scientific genius and used by a slurpy, wet, yucky alien with tentacles to wage a war against humans.

There’s a lot of spatial gizmo punctuating the film, including an ozone breaking warship that needs to be assembled through a three-point device that the scientist can put together, and he does before being shipped to Japan as a caged specimen.

Turtles, meanwhile, are happy with their pizza dropping high perches over soccer stadiums till they find out about the nasty escape. The mission, in a garbage truck and out of it, strays a lot into personal issues of the turtles and thus take away from all the swinging action.

A good one for diehard fans; discharge spewing villains, howsoever daunting, are not everyone’s cup of tea. Add to that turtles with human issues and you might just want to have them in another story, another time. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 5 June 2016