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Its been 14 years since the last Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, so I have been looking forward to seeing this new CG rendition. So opening night I drug a few friends to the nearest theater. My review may contain a few spoilers. You have been warned.

The plot line is good but not well balanced. The turtles have officially been out of action for a while since they defeated Shredder. Donatello and Michelangelo have menial day jobs. Raphael rebelliously stays up late fighting crime on his own. Leonardo is off training in the jungle at Splinter’s request.

Eventually Leo returns to lead his brothers. Everyone is thrilled except Raphael. The tension between Leo and Raph grows, and eventually leads to an awesome showdown between the two. This is about the point when the movie changes from old-school turtle goodness to a typical Saturday morning cartoon.

The other side of the plot involves a 3000 year old general with a curse of eternal life. He brings to life his old war buddies, who have been turned to stone, and uses them and the Foot Clan to collect 13 monsters from space. Once they are collected, the curse will be broken, but the stone buddies don’t like that plan. As far as I know, nothing about it is tied into any part of the Turtle’s universe, and it all felt like a rushed afterthought.

Despite the crazy plot, the movie was pretty enjoyable throughout. Even though the live-action Turtle costumes were great, I think CG fits them well. I would tweak the models a bit to make them look less like frogs though. The jokes were not as bad I as I feared and I even laughed out loud a few times. The fighting was OK but nothing too violent to scare the kiddies. The Turtles and Foot Clan (and sadly April and Casey too) all displayed quick ninja fighting skills with a heavy dose of roof-top jumping. There was only one real cheesy scene (Mikey skateboarding through the sewers) which apparently is a requirement for any TMNT movie.

I am looking forward to the hinted-at sequel. Hopefully they can get the story straight from the comics.

I give TMNT 6 pizza slices out of 8. Needs more Shredder.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.