Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows doesn't have a lot going for it. For a start the human characters are terminally flat, a gang of ancillary meat puppets, occasionally employed to burn up screentime whenever the budget doesn't allow for six or seven cavorting monsters. The Turtles themselves are given the bones of a self-determination angle, dramatically, we seem to be heading towards the kind of gold-plated acceptance enjoyed by Johnny 5 at the end of Short Circuit 2. The idea of the Turtles being thrust into the limelight and perhaps drifting apart is dangled but eventually rejected. Disappointingly Out of the Shadows ends upholding the sewer dwelling status quo.

Turtles 2's primary joy then is how it translates the oozing, radioactive aesthetics of its progenitor brand. Ninja Turtles is a property that explicitly sprang from drawings of repulsive beings. Instead of anything heroic and relatable, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's original comics gave us malformed faces stamped with rictus grins and empty, blaring eyes. While a cartoon series was content to render the characters as a series of cuddly circles, a simultaneous toy line employed a staggering level of imagination, perhaps looking to David Cronenberg's The Fly for ideas on how the basic Homo sapien outline could be warped and corrupted. Dave Green's film actually manages to bottle some of this lightning, offering up three central villains who range from stout and diseased to a flayed brain seeping out of a metallic titan's guts.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

The polar opposite of something off-brand and colourful like The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Jonathan Liebesman's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sees an established children's line subsumed in a misunderstood, post-The Dark Knight mire. Urban terror should be a decent fit for the franchise, after all Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's original comics were full of gritty avengers engaging in bootlegged, Frank Miller mysticism. Liebesman's film wobbles though because it's clearly meant to be consumed by kids. Pre-teens at that. The turtles have the sing-song personalities rattled off in Chuck Lorre's 80s cartoon theme and the central character is basically a child detective.

Ninja Turtles 2014 gives the impression of a half-term feature hijacked at the last minute to appeal to the ghoulish spectrum of the superhero crowd. Life-ending bumps and matter-of-fact executions are present but never justified. Shredder has been inserted as a final boss but there's no solid narrative space for him. Villain minutes are instead apportioned to a megalomaniacal scientist who's despatched with a spot of head trauma courtesy of the sixth male lead. Like every other rebooted 1980s toy line Ninja Turtles seems to have been pitched as being exactly the same but with even more violence. It's a playground grasp at maturity, chemical weapons are smuggled into the film as if to denote seriousness and weight.

Likewise the turtles are depicted as seething mini-Hulks with the strength to hurl rival ninjas through speeding subway trains. Raphael and pals are massive, sweating, muscle lumps apparently running on the Unreal Engine. Splinter is positively Cronenbergian and Shredder looks like Michael Bay's Megatron cosplaying as a Predator. All this ugliness directly informs the film's one saving grace - the fights are blocked like someone's watched a Donnie Yen movie. Liebesman shoots low and wide on full-contact between a menagerie of McFarlane Movie Maniacs. CG stunt work is experienced in sustained, side-slipped takes that emphasise impact with grinding, mechanical noise. The animated delivery in Ninja Turtles' action scenes may undermine any real sense of danger but I appreciated the effort.

Kirby The Fifth Turtle by Kevin Eastman

Turtles Forever

Produced to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, 4Kids Entertainment's feature length reality bender Turtles Forever unites a variety of disparate character incarnations, chiefly 1987's toyline supplement pizza chompers, and 4Kids' own iris free snarlers. These two Turtle groups collide when a madcap dimension hop goes awry, forcing the groups to puzzle through a caper together. There's comedy identity clash as each team struggles to understand the other.

The 80s Turtles derive from a universe that plays by explicitly juvenile rules. Universe pals enjoy regularly scheduled rescues from rampaging mutant food, and impossible techno-solutions can be whipped up on the fly. In contrast, the 2000s model exist in a state heavily indebted to Batman: The Animated Series, and sundry dubbed Japanese serials. Their universe has ongoing plot threads, and kid safe shake-ups. Turtles Forever toys with a rolling sense of agitated desperation as the 'serious' Turtles strain to make sense of their merchandised counterparts, and the power their universe bleed technology allows a competent, contemporary adversary. Even their location as the gruffer alternative is challenged when the two groups wind up in their monochrome inception universe. Immediately categorised as trespassers, the animation Turtles are swiftly battered by motion drafts of the original Eastman and Laird sociopath troupe.