TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

Unsurprisingly, I did not have a good time watching this latest live action feature film in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise.  I came to it neutral, having enjoyed the cartoons as a kid, but finding the previous films dull and the so-called witticisms of the turtles grating.  This reboot does little to change that diagnosis.  The best that can be said about it is that after the "alien origins" scare, the story is faithful to its source materials.  The four turtles, named after Renaissance painters, are mutated into humanoid ninja-fighting vigilantes who live in the sewers with their jedi master mutated rat-father Splinter.  They have a female friend and accomplice called April O'Neil, who's a pretty journalist and an evil nemesis too. In this film, that's a corporate greedy bastard who wants to infect the city so that he can sell it a cure and become massively rich - and of course, that cure comes from stringing up the turtles and extracting their mutated genes.

I found the relentlessly-alecky banter from the turtles really grating and there's none of the charisma that, say, Corey Feldman brought to the original voice-cast. Megan Fox does her standard pretty girl in distress thing as April O'Neil and it's not so much her fault that the part is woefully underwritten. But even weirder, we have Will Arnett, fifteen years her senior, playing her goofy cameraman. There's meant to be sexual tension between the two but it just comes across as creepy and icky.  Finally, we've got Whoopi Goldberg as April's editor - utterly wasted.

The movie is made in a very workmanlike way. You've got all the martial arts scenes and special effects and loud music and the compulsory sprinkling of "kowabungas". There's nothing to get excited about and the final thirty minutes just descends into a loud and rather dull working through of gears.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES has a running time of 101 minutes and is rated PG-13.    The film is on global release.

DRIVE ANGRY 3D

DRIVE ANGRY 3D is a brilliantly crass grind-house movie.  If you want to see a hot chick beat the crap out of a naked chick who's just been caught fucking the first chick's fiancé, then this is the movie for you. Or if you want to see a bad-ass smoking a cigar, fully clothed, fucking a naked woman in a motel room, while simultaneously shooting six assholes dead, then this is your flick!  The plot is ridiculous - obviously. Nic Cage plays a dude called John Milton (Paradise Lost, people!) who escapes Hell to chase down a cult-leader called Jonah (Billy Burke) and save his baby grand-daughter from having her head ripped off. Of course! He is helped by a smokin' hot waitress played by Amber Heard, and is in turn chased down by a mean guy called The Accountant dressed in a Men In Black style suit and played by William Fichtner. 

I'm not sure if it makes any sense to seriously review a movie who's every component justifies an exclamation mark, other than to say that director Patrick Lussier and writer Todd Farmer (MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D) have succeeded in making a movie as ridonkulous and vulgar as CRANK.  It's great as far as it goes and I really loved it for the first hour, but after that, the relentless car chases wore me down. Still, in this age of post-modern detached cynicism, you've got to love any movie that tries so hard to have a balls-out good time.  And, from a technical stand-point, in an era of retro-fitted piss-poor 3D, you've got to embrace DP Brian Pearson's wallowing in the schlock-entertainment factor of the medium.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE is on release in the UK, US, Bosnia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Canada, Estonia, Lithuania, Malaysia, the Philippines and Poland. It opens next week in Argentina, Egypt, the Czech Republic, Greece, Kazakhstan, Russia, Bulgaria, India and Armenia. It opens on March 25th in Uruguay, Belgium, France and Turkey. It opens in April in Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Panama, Venezuela and Singapore. It opens on May 13th in Iceland, on May 26th in Portugal and on August 6th in Japan.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - DATE NIGHT

There's something almost impressive about the fact that director Shawn Levy has taken two of the funniest comedians working today - Steve Carell and Tina Fey - and create a romantic comedy so utterly joyless and inauthentic. I honestly would not have believed it possible. This movie misses the mark so badly it's like the PEARL HARBOUR of romantic-comedies. Fey and Carell play a happily married but tired couple whose regular date night turns into a caper movie when they are mistaken for a couple that's blackmailing a local politician. Chased by organised crime and some bent coppers, it just so handily happens that Mrs Suburbs was a realtor to a super-buff Mission Impossible type special agent. Whenever I get mistakenly chased down by gansters, I am definitely going to ensure that I too can call on my friendly neighbourhood James Bond type. Anyways, there are shenanigans, and the couple turn out to be far more plucky and ingenious than is plausible, and it all ends with Tina Fey in a strip club. The only reason you might possibly watch this flick is for the James Franco-Mila Kunis scene in which they show the grown-ups how to do it. Presumably you can just you-tube that clip.

DATE NIGHT was released in April 2010. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Additional tags: Jimmi Simpson, Josh Klausner, Leighton Meester

BLADES OF GLORY - lament for the hillarious cameo

, ANCHORMAN, DODGEBALL....and now BLADES OF GLORY. Identikit comedies, often born of SNL sketches, featuring a couple of crazy characters with 1970s hair-dos - under-dogs, odd-ball couples, or ego-maniacs that go through a redemptive narrative arc. In general, I get a kick out of these movies, but of late I've noticed a worrying tendency toward under-written scripts, lazy visual gags and lame cameos.

BLADES OF GLORY is a case in point. The film-makers assume that Will Ferrell and Jon Heder can simply stand in front of a camera in crazy hair-dos and induce laughter in the audience. And when Ferrell's rock'n'roll thowback and Heder's camp teen-idol start ice-skating - that really is funny. But as soon as we leave the ice-rink and enter into the actual story of the film, the witty one-liners are scarce and the whole project has the damp, mouldy smell of Formula and Star-Vehicle.

Heder and Ferrell's characters are champion ice-skaters and sworn enemies. Banned from competing in the singles competition after a televised punch-up, they are foreced to enter as the first all-male pairs couple - thus prompting a lot of odd-couple comedy and some funny training montages. A sub-plot has a sinister brother-and-sister skating team send their sweet sister to spy on the new all-male pair and to break up the new "couple" by sleeping with both of them. Naturally, we have a nice redemptive narrative arc for the obnoxious Ferrell character and a sweet romantic ending for Heder's character.

So far as it goes, BLADES OF GLORY is fine. The skating routines are funny, and the intervening plot is harmless if sadly unfunny. I just feel that film-makers are getting away with sub-par scripts by relying on audiences good-will toward the stars. For instance, this movie includes a cameo by Luke Wilson. He is not given a single funny line and his presence is, frankly, unnecessary. It's as if, just by having him there, the film-makers will remind us of cooler movies like OLD SCHOOL - making BLADES OF GLORY look funny by association. Similarly, the movie has a cameo of Brian Boitano. Boitano doesn't SAY ANYTHING. But again, BLADES OF GLORY hi-jacks a little of the edginess of SOUTH PARK.

BLADES OF GLORY is on release in Canada, the US and the UK. It opens in Singapore, Argentina, Russia and Italy in April; in Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Denmark, Iceland, Mexico, Norway, Sweden and Brazil in May; in Australia in June; in Spain in July; in Finland and Turkey in August and in France on October 3rd.

THE MOGULS/THE AMATEURS - promises kookiness, delivers the commonplace

THE MOGULS is a feel-good comedy about a bunch of small-town losers who band together to make a feature-length porno and thus achieve something with their lives. The comedy relies on having a bunch of ordinary schmucks sitting around mama's house eating jell-o talking about lesbian sex. This appealed to my juvenile sense of humour for around half an hour and then I got mildly annoyed that the movie was turning out to be just another schmaltzy feel-good losers-do-well movie. It's like THE FULL MONTY but with tanned Hollywood stars - not least Jeff Bridges, William Fichtner, Tim Blake-Nelson and Ted Danson - less profundity and less jokes. In fact there is only one cast iron joke. The Fichtner character asks the Bridges character for a job on the movie - not too much work - just so he can stand around and watch stuff happen. Bridges makes him the Executive Producer. Apart from that, it's all pretty run-of-the-mill and I feel vaguely disappointed that in this day and age a closeted homosexual is still deemed comic fodder. So this is probably a movie to miss, or at most rent on DVD.

THE MOGULS went on limited release in the UK yesterday. It is known as THE AMATEURS in the US.