Here’s an easy test to determine whether you should shell out your bucks (sorry) for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows: Have you ever, at any point in your life and for any reason, owned a copy of Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters? If the answer is yes, you’ve spent enough time in the trenches of turtle fandom that you’ll get at least a few kicks out of the latest movie.
To be clear, there’s no universe where a Michael Bay-produced film that includes the words “mutant” and “ninja”—with a colon, to boot—doesn’t play like the mercenary ploy that it is. But to director Dave Green’s credit, Out of the Shadows—a follow-up to 2014’s punishingly terrible franchise reboot—represents such a dramatic improvement over its predecessor that it can’t help but qualify as a success. It’s relentlessly silly and stuffed with CG mayhem, but it reinstalls the sense of fun and the affection for the franchise that were so sorely missing from the last big-screen iteration, hitting just enough nostalgic soft spots to make it more than tolerable for viewers of a certain age.
All of which is a fancy way of saying Krang is in this one, and he looks pretty cool.
The action picks up about a year after the last movie left off. The four titular heroes are once again skulking around in New York’s sewers, the top world oblivious to their heroism—or their existence, for that matter. (If none of this makes sense, turn back now—there’s nothing here for you.) Eventually—read: in the first five minutes—the turtles are pressed back into action when their old nemesis, Shredder (Brian Tee this time), teams up with an interdimensional warlord called Krang (the voice of Brad Garrett). Since it’s 2016, the plot involves averting an apocalypse and overcoming an intra-superteam rift.
No one is going to accuse the screenwriters of aiming over their target audience’s heads, but the script is smart enough to make plenty of room for both familiar characters and new ones. The best returning cast member is Will Arnett, who reprises his role as smarmy cameraman Vernon Fenwick; newbies who bear mention include the great Laura Linney as New York’s police chief and Green Arrow’s Stephen Amell as a toned-down but still appealing Casey Jones. Reporter April O’Neil (Megan Fox), meanwhile, is as puzzlingly superfluous as she was last time around.
The plot is nonsense, of course, but the movie zips along at a pace that’s spry without feeling manic, and the action scenes are surprisingly well staged and cleanly edited. Many of them are lifted from other, better titles—there are at least two scenes that borrow heavily from Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films, and the Avengers movies are mercilessly mined for Out of the Shadows’ chaotic finale. Somehow, though, amid all those visual references and blatant rip-offs, it manages to cobble together a cohesive visual style that’s pleasingly bright and colorful.
The movie still has problems finding its own identity in the long-running glut of comic-book and superhero flicks, which is too bad. In a cooler dimension, all of this trend-hopping could have folded in on itself in some really fun, interesting ways. Early issues of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s cult-favorite comic poked fun at ’80s superhero titles in ways that were both obvious and sly. Never has there been a better time for a property that takes the same tack with superhero movies, and a bolder creative team might have turned this into something like a kid-friendly Deadpool.
But Out of the Shadows plays it sort of straight—at least, as straight as it can be played when we’re dealing with farting mutant warthogs and a mad scientist (courtesy of Tyler Perry, back in Madea mode) who’s more Igor than Dr. Frankenstein. There’s lots of existential bellyaching about coming to terms with one’s true nature and protecting people who are fearful and intolerant of their super-powered guardians, and the movie often seems hesitant to go the extra mile when it comes to embracing the property’s baroque silliness.
But when it’s firing on all cylinders, Out of the Shadows comes very close to channeling the weird charm of its pre-Bayed source material. It might not constitute a good movie by typical metrics, but it does make for a reasonably fun one.
April Snellings is a staff writer and project editor for Rue Morgue Magazine, which reaches more than 500,000 horror, thriller, and suspense fans across its media platforms. She recently joined the lineup of creators for Glass Eye Pix's acclaimed audio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick that has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
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