Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, A Most Wanted Man Reviews

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Dir. Jonathan Liebesman

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Through its initial life as a cult-hit comic book series, to the beloved TV cartoon, to the original 90's movies and beyond, for better or worse the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are part of the cultural zeitgeist (enough to even land a reference in last week's Guardians of the Galaxy).  It's no surprise that in 2014 we're seeing a re-imagining of the brand, because the cross-generational appeal is at that sweet spot where nostalgic twenty/thirty-somethings from the 80's and 90's and the current swath of children being brought up on the new Turtles cartoons have converged to make the box office green in more ways than one.  Taking the Batman Begins formula, this is an unnecessarily dark take on the Turtles, featuring large, hulking creatures with gravely voices in place of the more kid-friendly, round faced, "Cowabunga" characters fans are used to.  While there are a few fun moments here and there, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a juvenile, tonally imbalanced, poorly-written cash grab.

Coming from Michael Bay's production company Platinum Dunes, this film, though not as aggressively terrible as Transformers: Age of Extinction, still has all the markings of a Bay production.  The characters are all paper-thin stereotypes; the story follows April O'Neil (Megan Fox), a reporter whose dream is to just get that "big" story, who is unapologetically there just for eye candy (her first scene has her covering a news story about trampolines, during which she provocatively bounces up and down).  Then there's the turtles themselves, who each have the most broad, basic personalities; Michaelangelo is the "party dude," who, despite the illogicality of inter-species sex politics, creepily hits on Megan Fox; Donatello is the "nerd" of the group apparently just because he wears glasses; Leonardo (Johnny Knoxville) has no personality that I could discern of; and Raphael is kind of the "serious" one. Although there are brief moments where the fun of the "original" turtles poke through (like in a quick "elevator" scene), most of the film feels trapped inside this dark, gritty world that it has no place being in.

The main struggle I found with this film is that it tried to do too much - cater to young fans, older fans, and have a different take - and ultimately fails at doing any of them.  The ugly, freakish-looking turtles (and their master Splinter, who literally looks like a giant sewer rat), and the overly-sexualized context of the movie (Liebesman puts an action scene on hold just to get a shot of Fox's ass) makes it in my mind inappropriate for small children (or at least not aiming towards their demo), but its constantly annoying, childish humor and beyond-simple plot (just another miscellaneous bad guy wanting to take over New York...ugh again?) is not going to appeal to an older set either.  And don't get me started on the product placement!

While nothing really worked, I do think there were glimmers of a good movie embedded in here.  There's one action setpiece on a snowy mountain which had a lot of kinetic fun (but its total lack of a sense of geography ultimately ruins it) and the way the turtles physically moved was very fluid and worked for me.  I also did actually like the new design of Shredder, even though he was clearly more powerful than the turtles and could've slit their throat at any point. And the humor, while often cringeworthy, does work every once in a while (Will Arnet, playing another news reporter, practically saves the movie).  Overall, this was a confused, forgettable movie, but at a brief 90 minutes, at least it's not a slog.

Rating: C-

A Most Wanted Man
Dir. Anton Corbijn
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Phillip Seymour Hoffman left this Earth way too early; he was among my favorite actors of this generation, and his death definitely lingers over his final starring role in this John le Carre adaptation, A Most Wanted Man.  The methodically-paced spy thriller is about a German anti-terrorist organization, led by an aging, beer-gutted, cigarette-drawing Gunter Bachmann (Hoffman), on the trail of a Muslim refugee who may or may not be a bad guy or have bad guy connections.  Hoffman wants to use this refugee as a way of nabbing bigger fish, but other groups, like the CIA, just want to take and incarcerate this guy right away, potentially upsetting his plan for more leads. Altough it has a lot of the right ingredients for an edge-of-your-seat thriller, ultimately, A Most Wanted Man is a slow, boring, clinical film that's just dull to watch.  Spy work in real life probably isn't as glamorous as Hollywood would make it out to be - but that doesn't mean showing how it really works makes for a good film.  I think a lot of critics are blindsided by this movie because of Hoffman's presence, but I found it to be a real chore to sit through.

Anton Corbijn has a history of directing music videos and working with music artists (credited as having created the "image" of Depeche Mode and U2), which is ironic seeing as how this film has a minimal amount of music and a very "deliberate" pace (any time I hear that phrase, I translate it to "boring").  I didn't really care about any of the characters, and some of the dense plotting had me confused; keeping track of all the uninteresting cast members and their relationships to each other grew very tiresome.  Its dull color palette and lingering shots just made this movie feel twice as long as it should have.  Although the final scene in the film features a very good, "demo reel-worthy" cinematic parting moment for Hoffman, I left this movie feeling as cold and detached as its characters.

Rating: C-