I said it before and I’m saying it again: What Michael Bay and his henchmen have done to the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” franchise is criminal. Nearly $200 million criminal, but still. With the sequel rolling around, this time, you can see the effort made to get people like me to show up and endorse those hulking CGI creations.
After the previous movie wasn’t funny enough (how can you not think about humor with TMNT?), they looked around and strip-mined everything from 1987. Bebop and Rocksteady! Krang! The Technodrome, now in the spinning-parts-everywhere don’t-hold-a-focus-point CGI mandatory for every 2010s blockbuster. Yet, for all those callbacks, the mutagen is purple instead of green.
Then there’s what they’ve done to April O’Neil, still played by Megan Fox, and thus another reason I’m not touching this thing with a 39½-foot-pole. When there’s “a scene that gratuitously dresses her up as a schoolgirl fetish object for no reason” and the trailers make a point to include it, that’s not being true to anything. The 2012 Nickelodeon cartoon April is a more well-rounded character — bumped down in age to be a peer and trained in ninjitsu, so effectively a “fifth Turtle”. That’s way cooler than anything Fox could pull off.
While the argument has been made that every TMNT series is “built from the ground up as a rebootable property” (the linked article is basically a rebuttal to my rants), the 2010s movies remain a bridge too far for me.