Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Dear Dawn Barkan, Rat Trainer,

Seems like a dangerous time to be training animals. Apes are riding horses and shooting machine guns. Raccoons are flying starships and shooting machine guns. Sharks are falling from the sky and being mowed down by machine guns! Now it’s mutated turtles turning into ninjas and – you guessed it – getting shot by machine guns.

Business is really booming, huh?

Luckily you had a much safer job: working with the wise old rat, Splinter, spiritual leader and father figure to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He’s a much more frail presence than his young green protégées, and it’s his new found vulnerability that spurs the turtles into action…

Oh, what am I talking about? This is a Michael Bay joint. Everyone is an action star. Splinter was obviously enrolled in the same parkour classes that Yoda took in preparation for the prequels—he’s just as badass as the teenagers he raised. It must have taken you years to train that beady-eyed martial arts master to move so quickly! Or did you just use a regular rat for the flashback sequences and let the special effects team go wild on the older version of the sensei?

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

Maybe this is a good time to start talking about my own pet peeves with the film.

See, TMNT reigned supreme in my childhood. Which meant, yes, it took me most of the movie to adjust to these new voices, adapt to the new look, and feel comfortable with my boyhood buddies squaring off against machine-gun toting terrorists. But I eventually came around (or gave in to) these changes. 

The dynamic within the group, for example, still works. Michelangelo gets all the best lines, Raphael gets to grunt and moan, Donatello brings the nerd factor, and Leonardo is as boring as ever (despite being voiced by Johnny Knoxville). Megan Fox is also a fine April O’Neill, and Will Arnett providing comic relief as a cameraman doesn’t ruin anything.

What does ruin things, however, is the ultra-lame Amazing Spider-Man everyone-is-involved-in-the-conspiracy plotline. Not that it’s inherently a bad idea to make April’s dad a scientist who worked on the ooze that mutated the turtles (and April once treating them like pets), but to tack on the reporter-who-stumbles-on-the-story gimmick is one coincidence too far. And by amping-up the turtles to superhero status, making them invincible to bullets and moving at unintelligible speeds, the action sequences are just more incoherent Bayhem tripe—even if Michael Bay was only a producer.

Jonathan Liebsman tries every trick in the book to crowd the frame with lens flares, colliding axes, Dutch-angle dolly-shots and shaky-cam nonsense. His editing goes for a bare minimum average shot length, and the whole frantic effort feels strangely dated— you know, from a time before Marvel proved the benefits of making action comprehensible again. Even the evil Shredder goes full Transformers in this film, for reasons they don’t even pretend to explain.

A line about the turtles not, in fact, being “aliens” was the only moment of self-awareness the filmmakers allowed. Had that ridiculous change been applied to this franchise’s already ridiculous premise, your job on this film might not even have existed. 

Though maybe that would have freed up your time to work on more films like Inside Llewyn Davis.

Speaking of which—your turn to write back, Dawn!

Feeling trapped,

Christopher 

Status: Standard Delivery (2.5/5)

Guardians of the Galaxy

Dear Stan Lee, Cameo Appearance Maker,

As a non-comic book reader, I’m only familiar with the world you’ve created through the unending series of superhero films that have taken over my summer movie schedule for the past six years. Like you and your token cameos, I show up dutifully for each, because that’s just what us guys do (as film reviewers or franchise founders, I mean). I usually enjoy myself too, though without the nostalgic nerdgasm of your more faithful devotees. 

Then a relatively new property like Guardians of the Galaxy comes along. It’s the tale of intergalactic outsiders, and promises to be cut from a different cloth (leather!). However, instead it just feels a little cut and paste.

This is both good and bad news for a film that’s hoping to uphold one of the most successful studio runs in history. And I’m sure it will. It’s got strong character moments (casting Chris Pratt in the lead is pure genius) and enough bang-bang zap-zap action to fill whatever quota these films must meet. But for all the talk about bringing in B-movie favourite James Gunn to co-write and direct, the edginess that was anticipated doesn’t amount to much more than the odd dirty word and middle finger gag. Oh, and a clever Jackson Pollock joke that is too layered to earn the X-rating it deserves. Still, it’s pretty anti-climactic for everyone who is starting to see through the familiar beats of these super-franchises.

The lonely outsider with a dying parent. The mischievous fun with the new powers. The sassy hero and humourless love interest. The world-ending MacGuffin. The destruction of a major city. It’s a tough line to walk between giving the audience what they want and going through the motions. And while the small moments are the ones that work best in the film, the big ones end up defining the overall experience.

You, of course, can separate yourself from this band of misfits. In fact, you tried to. You have a creator credit on Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, the Avengers, Spider-Man and the X-Men, but only a tangential relationship with the Guardians of the Galaxy. Yet when the fanboy community lamented your non-participation, you made the (wise) choice to show up for your Where’s Waldo moment; in this particular case, hitting on some young alien women. It wasn’t your most inspired cameo appearance (especially after your scene-stealer in Captain America: Winter Soldier), but your presence nonetheless meant something to fans—even tangential ones, like me. These are the good Marvel moments.  

But there are others, which Guardians relies on, that are beginning to reveal the studio’s Mad-Lib method of story construction. This includes the characters themselves. You’ve got Star-Lord and Rocket Racoon vying for who can out-Hans Solo one other, leaving all the straight-man work to the bored looking (green) woman. You also have Drax, whose only real contribution to the group is his Vulcan’s sense of humour. Then there’s the single-sentence speaking Groot (voiced, hilariously and pointlessly, by Vin Diesel), who might be the clearest attempt at a Star Wars-meets-Avengers mash-up by playing a sort of Chewbacca/Hulk character, complete with a rag-doll-the-enemy moment. It’s all people and moments we’ve seen dozens of times before, which provides only requisite and temporary pleasure.

Not that it matters, I guess. As long as we keep buying tickets, this formula isn’t going to change.

See you soon,

Christopher

Status: Standard Delivery (3/5)