Blu-ray Review | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles directed by Jonathan Liebesman

“You’re... ninja mutant turtle teenagers?”

Little did she know when she was performing it, but Megan Fox’s self-referential one-liner would hold a mirror up to everything that’s wrong with Jonathan Liebesman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The ingredients are all there, and there’s no denying that they’re looking better than ever, but they’re confused to the point of absurdity.

After hearing horror stories about its script and development (Colonel Schrader, planet of the Turtleoids... the list goes on) I was wary about this franchise-rebooting movie, but nonetheless keen to have my prejudices dispelled. A couple of thrilling and really quite funny trailers (“Don’t freak out! It’s just a mask,” says Mikey to a terrified April, unfastening his bandana to reveal his grinning, mutant face); a beautiful, comic-inspired animated intro sequence; and the sight of Megan Fox in cartoon-homage yellow leather helped to get me on side, and when I saw the Ninja Turtles for the first time in the light of day, I was absolutely shell-shocked. “Photo real” isn’t the half of it; these motion-captured, CG-rendered mutants don’t just look real, but feel real. Each turtle is unique, with tattered real-world gear that reflects their respective personalities, but still stays broadly true to the well-established Ninja Turtle paradigm. You get the impression that these hulking monstrosities are the truth behind a sweetened fiction - the real-life, rough-around-the-edges inspiration for the comic books and cartoons. I think that’s what Liebesman and his team were gunning for, and they’ve demonstrably excelled themselves on this front.

The impressive visuals extend to the rest of the movie, from the detail of the Ninja Turtles’ sewer lair (with its pizza-box sofa and innovative boom-box wall) to snowy set pieces involving eighteen-wheelers and rooftop showdowns where even the camera never takes a moment’s breath. The damn thing never stops rolling; it’s always circling, zooming, retracting, spinning. Moviegoers who care only for popcorn and high-octane action cannot have a complaint here; I, however, do.

A movie is nothing without a half-decent story, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles doesn’t have one. Worse, what it does have strays far from the well-established Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles origin stories, and to the detriment of all but April’s once-camp camera man. In this iteration, the Ninja Turtles and Splinter are no more than lab rats turned loose, learning ninjutsu from a conveniently-tossed-in-the-sewers book rather than an ill-fated human sensei or even a human sensei turned mutant rat. Oruku Saki, meanwhile, is now the charming all-American, Eric Sachs, and his Shredder accomplice is a visually terrifying but ultimately hollow creation, the victim of a last-minute rewrite (the lesser of two evils, in every sense).

Fortunately the five mutants’ finely finessed portrayals and Will Arnett’s far-from-pink-shirts-and-braces Vernon Fenwick are strong enough to save the movie from utter calamity, but ultimately the headline is similar to the one that I’d apply to co-producer Michael Bay’s Transformers live-action series: an almost peerless feast for the eyes, but little besides.

The bonus material on offer is a cut above the standard of most action movies, but far below what you’d expect for something with such a huge cult following. The extras on the Blu-ray total less than an hour, which even when compared to some of the Michael Bay Transformers Blu-ray releases, is decidedly underwhelming. The obligatory ‘making of’ features are spread across three smaller programmes, one of which examines the technical aspects of bringing the Ninja Turtles back to the silver screen, and another which focuses on the men behind the motion capture. The third then looks at the role of computers in film-making a little more generally, but with obvious emphasis on the instant motion picture. The most intriguing featurette though is entitled Evolutionary Mash-Up. What I thought would be a throwaway featurette turned out to be more enjoyable than the feature presentation, as historians and biologists convene trace the ancestry of the shinobi / ninja throughout the ages in parallel to the evolution of the planet’s many species of turtle and tortoise.

The rest of the material is much less substantial – the extended ending clocks in at well under a minute, leading me to question why it was cut, particularly when it seems such a nice coda to the April / Vernon thread, and the three musical features average just a few minutes each.

Overall neither the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Blu-ray nor the download are easy to recommend. Unless you’re a real sucker for action and have more money than sense, you’d be best advised to spend a fiver more and get yourself an iTunes series pass for the ongoing Nickelodeon series, which seems to have effortlessly accomplished everything that this movie should have done, yet with only a fraction of the budget.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is available to download from iTunes in 1080p HD for £13.99, along with around sixty minutes’ worth of iTunes Extras. The Blu-ray contains the same bonus material, and some stores’ copies also include all four replica Ninja Turtle bandanas. The cheapest online retailer today is Amazon, who are selling the disc for £13.00 with free delivery.