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.

A short essay on vomit-inducing cinema

SANTA CLAUSE 3: THE ESCAPE CLAUSE should be prosecuted under the Competition laws for shamelessly exploiting a captive market of parents who have to take their kids to see a film over the festive season but aren't in one of the handful of towns showing THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS 3D. I haven't seen it and I'm not going to for a couple of reasons. First, even the trailer - the so-called highlights - was painfully unfunny. Second, I've seen the first two and I'll never get those hours back. Third, the reviews have been so universally grim that I can't see what I would add. I really don't enjoy bad-mouthing a movie for the heck of it, and how could I top Mark Kermode's description of the movie as the cinematic equivalent of tertiary syphilis? Anyway, as I have said before, Christmas movies featuring jolly Santas make me heave. It's vomit-inducing cinema and not in a good way. Still, in case you're erring on the side of evil, you can read a proper review here.

JACKASS NUMBER TWO is a pointless movie to review, if it's a movie at all. It's basically a poorly shot string of skits just like in the infamous MTV TV show. Johnny Knoxville and his gang of extreme sports miscreants do things to themselves involving bodily fluids and explosives that are designed to cause pain and nausea in the viewer. To fans of such real-life gross-out humour, JACKASS NUMBER TWO is vomit-inducing in a good way, and as a fan of consumer choice I'm happy they have an opportunity to get their fix. It's not my cup of tea, so I won't be watching it, but I am reliably informed by my teenage cousins who fall squarely in the target demographic that the movie did what all good genre-movies should: it did exactly what is said on the tin. But if you want a proper review, you can click here.

SANTA CLAUSE 3 has already infected Germany, the US, the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, Iceland, Italy and the UK. Japan gets infected on December 2nd, Turkey on Dec 8th, Argentina on Dec 14th, Belgium on Dec 20th and Spain and Venezuela on Dec 22nd.

JACKASS NUMBER TWO is on release in the US, Netherlands, Russia, Iceland, Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Australia and the UK. It opens in Germany next week, in Sweden on December 8th, Estonia on December 29th and in Japan on January 13th. The Region 1 DVD is released on December 26th.