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April 14, 2007

Go ninja, go ninja, go!

I finally got to see the new ninja turtle movie, "TMNT." It's really very good.

Much as writer Elmore Leonard always says he leaves the parts out of his books that readers skip over anyway, TMNT has very little fat. There is no origin story -- it is presumed viewers are familiar enough with the comics, one of the many cartoons or the 3 live action movies, to which this is more or less a direct sequel. There is an elaborate plan by the villain that defies logic, but since it does defy logic, they don't waste time trying to explain it. Yes, there are 13 monsters loose in the world (who have somehow been loose for 3000 years but only been noticed right now), and four living stone warriors, and catching all the monsters will make the stone warriors human again, which they don't really want any more, but why dwell on it? Point is that they're here now.

The turtles themselves are not radically reinvented. Like the old theme song told us, Leonardo leads, Donatello does machines, Raphael is cool but rude, Michaelangelo is a party dude. But this time, Leonardo's gone into self-imposed exile in Brazil to learn leadership skills (how you do that without being around others is a mystery), and Master Splinter (whose new design I'm not crazy about -- looks more like a fox than a rat) has ordered that the turtles may not fight individually, but only as a team, so the rest have taken odd jobs, with only Raphael disobeying the master by becoming a masked vigilante.

April O'Neil's no longer a reporter, but some kind of architecture expert. Casey Jones, who has moved in with her, is still a vigilante at times, but mostly just her assistant. And for the first time in any turtles movie, I actually believed the attraction and chemistry between them, a vibe Elias Koteas never achieved with either Judith Hoag or Paige Turco (and where are THEY now?). Sarah Michelle Gellar and Chris Evans voice the duo here, and it's top-notch work from both.

Director Kevin Munroe, who's now apparently making a G-Force/Gatchaman movie, may have pared the story down so it's all action, but he gets the characters very well. Raphael is the argumentative a-hole as usual, but this is the first of the four feature films to actually look at why that is, and make you sympathize with his point of view, rather than simply having him be the troublemaker for the sake of conflict. And the humor is mostly smart -- there's one notable burp joke, but the rest is like the scene in which Raphael -- in vigilante disguise -- asks Casey how he knew it was him, and Casey responds that it wasn't hard, because he looks like a giant metal turtle. For a cartoon, TMNT doesn't insult the audience or pander -- one background gag is a store called "Cesare's Cabinet Makers."

And the fights kick ass, with imaginative choreography and appropriate humor. A scene where Raphael battles the Critters-like Jersey Devil would make the Yuen brothers proud.

I'm too old to have had the turtles hardwired into my consciousness as a kid, but I always did enjoy the video-games and original Eastman/Laird comics, and thought the live action movies were fun. Those who were the perfect age for the toys the first time, like my cousin Arthur, may appreciate this new rendition even more. What's missing is a theme song as cool as some of the older ones. While there's a decent tune on the end credits called "Shell Shock," there's nothing as enjoyably campy as either the original "Heroes in a Half Shell" cartoon theme, "T-U-R-T-L-E Power" by Partners in Kryme, or Vanilla Ice's "Ninja Rap" (though Ice has been working on a new heavy metal version of that tune).

But they do still eat pizza and say "dude." This isn't a radical reinvention; it's merely "radical, dude!"

Posted by LYT at April 14, 2007 6:44 PM [Message Board]

Comments

Posted by: MarioGeorgeNitrini111 at April 14, 2007 7:32 PM

Posted by: David N. Scott at April 14, 2007 7:56 PM

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