They’ve been around so long that they’re now the Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles, and their ’80s vibe — cowabunga, dude! — is so strong that I kept expecting a cameo by Huey Lewis or Max Headroom.
But the reason the second big-screen relaunch of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” in just the last seven years is as forgettable as the previous effort is that blockbuster excitement is a little hard to whip up from a one-joke idea. Then again, there’s an entire hit movie built around a sharp-shooting, fast-talking raccoon, so what do I know?
Megan Fox, the former Shia LaBeouf colleague who has wide experience working with slimy little reptiles who think they’re cool, is bland and insipid as a New York City TV reporter — Lois Lame — who stumbles across a shadowy vigilante band of underground-dwelling terrapins. They’re so super- secret that they splash their logo all over the scene every time they battle their villainous rivals, the Foot Clan. They’re led by sort of a “Transformers” version of Darth Vader crossed with Edward Scissorhands.
Wisecracking, pizza-scarfing brethren Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo turn out to be the same turtles April (Fox) once rescued, along with a super-intelligent rat, from her dad’s lab when she was a little girl. The brothers were infected with your basic superpower serum and grew up in the sewers, where they were trained by their rat sensei in the art of karate — turtle wax on, turtle wax off.
Together with her cameraman (Will Arnett), April strives to learn the secret behind the wealthy businessman who used to work with her father, but since the rich guy is played by ferret-faced William Fichtner — a guy whose own mother probably says, “I don’t know, there’s just something skeezy about him” — there isn’t a lot of suspense about where he’ll end up. He says things like, “April came early this year” (when April shows up at his house in winter) or, “Time to take a bite out of the Big Apple.”
The turtles’ mix of fighting prowess and jaunty middle- school chatter (lots of uses of “bro”) might work for the Nickelodeon crowd, but for grown-ups, the comedy-action mash-up is as weird as if the Dark Knight took a break from belting the Joker to plug Pizza Hut and bang out a hiphop beat on his nunchucks. The film saves up its sole instance of wit for the last 10 seconds, when the guys crank up “Happy Together” by the Turtles.
The clattering but generic climax (Fox winds up dangling from things, as per usual) is on top of the Condé Nast building, which makes this film the worst idea to come from that location since Kimye were on the cover of Vogue. The sequel will need some fresh thinking, which seems unlikely to happen considering the toy-commercial nature of this one. But I’ll be first in line if you can promise me that TMNT will get their asses kicked by C.H.U.D.