Secret of the Snooze: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS

If you buy a ticket for a movie called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows you get what you paid for. It follows the stereotypical sequel strategy of “same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.” Like its predecessor, the 2014 reboot of the 90’s big-screen live-action adaptations of the animated TV interpretations of the comic books – it’s a nesting doll of cultural recycling – it follows the continuing adventures of a quartet of teenage turtles who are mutant ninjas. Or are they teenage mutants who are turtle ninjas? Or would it be more accurate to call them mutant turtles who are teenage ninjas? However you arrange the adjectives, they’re a mostly indistinguishable group. You can tell them apart by their headbands’ colors, and the small particulars, like the nerd’s goggles and the brawn’s gruffness, and the dweeb’s annoying wisecracks. Anyway, there’s yet another threat to New York City and the turtles have to jump into action and save the day. Cowabunga and whatnot.

Out of the Shadows is a glossy live-action cartoon, with hulking steroidal turtles, buff beasts with hard shells and harder abs, bouncing through energetic adventure sequences. The plot, again by screenwriters Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec, is pitched at the lower end of the Saturday morning cartoon level, with thin motivations and broad conflict broken up into episodic chunks and strung along by clunky exposition and juvenile humor. But the action is often enjoyable as big, dumb, colorful excitement involving: a tricked-out garbage truck in attack mode; a mad scientist; evil ninjas; two felons mutated into vaguely humanoid large jungle animals by purple ooze; a tank; a waterfall; a hockey stick; three glowing MacGuffins; a portal in the sky spitting out a gigantic war machine piece by piece; and an interdimensional slimy tentacle-waggling brain stuffed inside a robot.

Director Dave Green – of the amiably passable kid-friendly found-footage E.T. knockoff Earth to Echo – knows his way around slick, silly movement, shooting it all in an energetic and propulsive style. It’s bouncy and convincing enough, even when a giant rhino man is chasing a dude who has slapped together makeshift rollerblades. Matching the first movie’s standout setpiece of a semi sliding down a mountain, this one features a sequence in which the turtles jump out of one plane onto another, fight inside that plane’s cargo hold, then crash it into a rainforest river that takes them down rapids while fleeing a tank. It’s a neat feat of totally nutty adventure. That’s fun. The rest of the movie can be a bit of a slog, trudging through flat human story beats, with returning reporter April (Megan Fox, used mostly for sex appeal in a movie ostensibly aimed at 9-year-olds) as a turtle ally. Meanwhile, her cameraman (Will Arnett) is taking public credit for the turtle’s heroism from the last time.

We’re introduced to new people who only exist to push along the plot. There’s Stephen Amell as a police officer determined to find the now-fugitive Shredder (Brian Tee) after seeing him escape on his watch. There’s Tyler Perry as the aforementioned mad scientist, amusingly playing him like a slightly goofier Neil deGrasse Tyson. There’s Laura Linney as a no-nonsense detective, totally straight-faced while talking to CGI teenage mutant ninja turtles like they’re real people. None of these people are characters; they're barely even story. Eventually the gooey brain (with the voice of Brad Garrett) is threatening to emerge and, I don’t know, smash up New York a bit. The whole thing is conventional summer blockbuster stuff, with the bad guys snatching up MacGuffins and the good guys trying to stop a disaster movie from breaking out.

Sure, the PG-13 cartoon roughhousing is sometimes diverting enough, but without a reason to care it’s hard to get invested beyond the surface spectacle. I suppose it comes down to me not liking the turtles, and not even being able to tell them apart most of the time even though they introduce themselves at least three times over the course of this movie. They’re not as poorly characterized as the humans, but they’re still hard to know beyond the token “likes pizza” and “good at ninja things” details. They don’t even have much conflict, idly wondering if people would ever accept them out of the sewers before re-embracing their secrecy. They learn to work together and share their feelings. It’s rote kids’ movie moralizing, just another unsuccessful way to make it seem like this silly distraction amounts to something worthwhile beyond its all too fleeting goofy flashes of excitement.

Give 'Em Shell: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

I must admit the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have never really worked for me. There’s something about their characters that holds me at a distance. Maybe it’s because they’re so similar in look – big humanoid turtle things differentiated only by the color headbands their wear – and personality. They have the names of Italian Renaissance artists: Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Donatello. They all love pizza, do martial arts, shout “cowabunga,” and live with their adopted mutant rat father in the sewers below New York City. It’s a collection of silly details that never quite grabbed me in any form be it comics, animated series, video games, or feature films.

I still felt that distance in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a reboot of the live action big screen turtle movies. But somehow this transparently silly goof of an adventure movie kept me distracted, if not quite entertained. It’s not a good movie, but it’s competent as it runs through a standard superhero plot with a big bad threatening a city and the heroes who save the day. That its climax only puts about 10 city blocks in immediate danger is a nice change of pace. Is it progress that this summer spectacle is a retread of blockbuster beats from a decade or two ago instead of staking a claim in the apocalyptic stakes race we’ve been living through the last few years?

The movie follows an intrepid reporter (Megan Fox), the sort of ambitious young newsperson who is sick and tired of fluff pieces and wants to do serious journalism. One night she spots a group of mysterious vigilantes breaking up the evil Foot Clan’s nefarious deeds on the docks and comes face to face with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Some fun is had with their improbable details as Fox tries to explain to her newsroom colleagues (Will Arnett and Whoopi Goldberg) what she has discovered. She sounds crazy. Meanwhile, desperate to keep their existence secret, the turtles and their rat father set out to find and befriend her.

The human characters are stock flat types that don’t make much of an impact beyond whatever charms the actors bring. But there’s a CGI realism to the textures of the turtles’ and rat’s skin that makes them marginally more convincing as living beings. It also makes them far creepier than the phony rubbery costumes of their previous early-90’s live action appearances. Now they’re uncannily real and utterly fake in the same instance. We’re not talking the apes from Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes here. The Ninja Turtles speak with energetic voices (provided by Johnny Knoxville, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, and Jeremy Howard) as their faces light up with giggly banter and gain flashes of gravitas. Their rat guardian Splinter (Tony Shalhoub) has damp and furry features of uncomfortably verminous countenance as his dojo voice intones ponderously.

Eventually, as a nefarious C.E.O. (William Fichtner) and Shredder (Tohoru Masamune), the head of the Foot Clan, team up to spray poison from the top of a skyscraper and make billions off the cure, the turtles and their new human ally get drawn into saving the day. It’s a small, thin plot. You’ve seen the basic beats before and here they’re replayed dutifully. Even the surprises aren’t surprising, you know?  At least it has a small, thin sense of humor about itself.

Arnett becomes Fox’s sidekick, providing sarcastic asides, while Goldberg gets the most charm out of far too little screen time. (I could’ve used at the very least one more scene with her wisecracking editor.) The screenplay by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, and Evan Daugherty is peppered with corny wisecracks and laughs that may not be entirely intentional, but still fit the silly mood. It's not much of a plot, and I certainly couldn’t tell you which turtle was which at any given time, but at least there’s room for a villain preparing to get inside a robotic samurai suit to say, “Tonight, I shall dine on turtle soup.” That’s the kind of straight-faced laugh line that makes me smile.

Speaking of straight-faced, director Jonathan Liebesman, behind spectacles both bad (Battle: Los Angeles) and okay (Wrath of the Titans), directs with a heavier hand than the material requires. It’s kid’s movie bounciness – the turtles are goofballs – smashed up against PG-13 roughness – a bad guy is dissolved from the inside out in somewhat graphic fashion. Lulu Carvalho’s beams-of-light-soaked cinematography is presented with a glossy seriousness, cut together in a standard amped-up chaos cinema style. I suppose when you’re dealing with material this flimsy, and so half-aware of its own inanity, grounding it in a sense of thriller weight makes the utterly weightless bounding of its inhabitants slightly less likely to float away into nothingness.

The overly familiar plotting is done and over with quickly and not as painfully as the who-is-this-for? tone or the tediously expositional rat would lead you to believe. The movie is completely empty-headed, a bland and mostly undistinguished effort that spends more time acting like it’s fun than actually being fun. It mostly goes through the motions, but at least it’s not a total waste. In the movie’s action centerpiece, a semi slaloms down a snowy mountainside as bad guys give chase and characters fall in, out, and around. It has a zip and novelty that makes it one of this summer’s better spectacle sequences, provided you can forget that there’s no towering mountain a mere 19 minutes out of Manhattan. But by that point you’ve already accepted that there are man-sized mutant turtle teenagers with ninja skills. What’s a little geographic confusion on top of that?