So I saw TMNT...

Here's my brief review for Michael "Napalm" Bay's take on the Teenage Alien Mutant Ninja Turtles. I'm sort of writing this on the fly, addressing things as they come to me. I had a lot if issues with this movie but i'll try to balance it out with nice things as well.
My buddy Ice Varen and I was originally going to give this one a pass. The last movie we really wanted to see this year was Guardians of the Galaxy but on a Monday afternoon with nothing better to do, we wandered into our local cinema and shelled out our hard earned scratch to see this flick. (Get it? Shelled? Cause- Cause they're anyway...)
Let me start off with the thing that bothered me the most about this movie after the fact that Michael Bay was producing it. Megan Fox. I don't like her as an actress and as expected her performance disappointed me. In many of the scenes she was in her movements were exaggerated and she came off as crazy or stupid. Early on in the movie she's talking to a dock worker that got robbed by the foot clan and while he's telling her what happened she's jamming her pen onto her note book and nodding her head like she's having a seizure. Seriously, the girl who played young April in the flashbacks was better than Fox. Oh, another thing that bugged me was that while she's supposed to be this reporter, she doesn't own a camera. When she's snooping for dirt on the foot clan she takes pictures with her Iphone and then cross checks them with google. This can't be what journalism has been reduced to in reality can it? Step your game up girl! Peter Parker is working with a hand me down and he's getting on just fine.
On a positive note, the turtles weren't that bad. They were funny and did a decent job of reminding the viewer that even though they were fucking HUGE they are still teenagers and act accordingly. Seriously, the turtles are massive, making the idea of them being ninjas either incredible or ridiculous, still not sure which. Raphael looks like some hellish combination between a turtle and the incredible hulk. Even Donatello, the smallest of the four looked like he could crack a man's skull open like an egg. The fact that they are huge honestly doesn't bother me that much. They're mutants I get it. Mutagen's a hell of a drug. It's how they looked in the face that got me. They look like humans that turned into turtle monsters, not turtles that mutated into bipedal humanoid beings if that makes sense?

Ugh.
Shredder could have been done better. You never see his face but hey that isn't bad. He's a villainous head of a clan of ninjas, he doesn't need a face. What bugged me was his suit. It wasn't how it looked (it was) it's just that the first time he fights the turtles he's already got his Shredder-Bot 2.0 upgrade. I feel it would have been better for him to have kicked their ass without it and then when they face him for the final confrontation at the end and he does have the armor that would just add to the dread of four teenagers having to square of against a ninja master by themselves.
The armor itself was very bright, like silver and gold making him look like the genetic by-product of a foursome between the silver samurai, a decepticon, a power ranger villain and a swiss army knife. All in all it was okay, it just could have been better.
This was annoying to me, others may not have a problem with it but after the turtles kick the foots ass the first time early on in the movie and send shredder's second in command back to him (who is apparently supposed to be his adopted daughter or something) he tells her to do whatever it takes to lure the vigilantes out into the open, to use innocent civilians as bait. I feel a villain shouldn't have to be told how to be a villain. Just go ahead and do it, you don't have to make the point to say it to clarify you are a menacing bad guy.
Oh that scene in question was fucking hilarious too. The foot takes a subway platform full of people hostage and just yell into the tunnels "We know you're out there! We'll start killing people 'cause were bad and junk!" etc etc. How the fuck did they know to go into the subway? What made them do that? They never saw the turtles and had no way of knowing where they could be! Did i miss the bit when they got wind of they could be hiding in the subway?
Later in the movie the bad guys (I keep just calling them bad guys because I don't want to name names and spoil anything) have Don, Leo and Mikey hostage. They want the mutagen that made them what they are to complete this master plan that is very reminiscent of the plot from The Amazing Spider-Man. Bad guy says "Drain them of all their blood! Even if it kills them!" Of course its going to kill them! You don't have to say that to look evil and remind the audience you're a bad guy!
Okay something nice something nice... uh... The guy who played Raph was the guy who played Aquaman in Smallville... sooooo.... that was kind of cool? But I found myself missing the Brooklyn accent.
The action was pretty decent and surprisingly lacking in explosions for a Michael "Terry Crews Old Spice Commercial" Bay movie but there wasn't a whole lot of ninjitsu going on. Like, at all. The turtles really didn't sneak around all that much and the foot clan weren't even ninjas themselves, just mercenary dudes in body armor with guns. Even Shredder was more like a mega-man villain than a ninja war lord. Oh! Actually, best way to sum up how he fought in that movie was the boomerang guy from Mega-Man X! How the turtles learned ninjitsu was also kind of a let down. Splinter wasn't a ninja's pet or anything, he just taught himself martial arts and then taught the turtles so that they could defend themselves against humanity or so they could, like discipline themselves and control their powers, or so they could fight the foot because Splinter knew who they were or something. I don't know. It was never really clear. All I know is that even though Splinter basically forbade them from going to the surface they had a ton of high tech gear.
Anyway, I bitch but all in all it was decent. Like, 6.5 out of ten. I won't be falling over myself to get the DVD Blu-Ray when it comes out but it wasn't a total let down. If you like ninja turtles, sure it's worth a go if you can stomach Megan Fox. If you're a die hard fan just continue to curse Michael Bay like everyone else. In the future if, they crank out more of these movies, i think that in the second one they actually start fighting ninjas. After Shredder got his ass handed to him by the turtles he could maybe decide that modern technology has made his men weak and then busts out the classic ninjas to fight these turtles. After that doesn't work by the end of the second movie the third movie could have mutants and stuff. That'd be neat.