My Review of TMNT · 8:25pm Jul 7th, 2022
Rating Scale:
12/10—a complete masterpiece; flawless and outstanding
11/10—Excellent, near-perfect film
10/10—the standard rating; awesome film with a couple of flaws
9/10—a wonderful film with several flaws
8/10–a great film with numerous flaws but not enough to ruin it
7/10—a fun and entertaining movie; not great but still enjoyable
6/10—a slightly above average film; it is something I might watch again
5/10—mediocre movie; not awful but not great either
4/10—a below average film; it could have been much better
3/10—a bad film; poorly written and poorly executed
2/10—a very bad movie; the few good things in the movie overshadowed by the bad things
1/10—a terrible movie; a total waste of time
0/10—a worthless piece of abomination; should have never been made
Greetings, everyone! This is Mr. J back with another movie review for today! This afternoon, I will be reviewing TMNT from 2007! Just like with Barnyard, it is yet another animated kids film I grew up watching. Like with other films, I would often watch it as I really enjoyed the movie and its characters. As a matter of fact, this movie introduced me to the franchise even though I was never a big fan of it. But I still considered the overall franchise to be pretty cool but not anything special to me personally. Now that I have re-watched it recently, I still think it is pretty much entertaining for the most part. However, it has some lackluster character development and antagonists which I will get to later.
After the defeat of Shredder, the teenage mutant ninja turtles have grown apart. But once a new threat rises in New York City, Master Splinter advises his students to regrow their brotherly bond if they are to defeat their new enemies. However, things take a nasty turn as Raphael holds resentment towards Leonardo. The two brothers must make amends before the whole city is doomed.
While I really enjoyed the story, Leonardo's character could have been more fleshed out because it felt like they just threw some information of what he has been doing during the years of his absence from NYC and didn't show us how he was a bad leader before and what led him to seek for self-improvement. The only turtle that actually had some character growth was Raphael; a hot-headed brother who has resentment and anger towards Leonardo for leaving them and being treated as "little soldiers" while he acts as leader...even though we barely see Leo doing the latter part in this film. We're just simply told of this conflict instead of actually seeing it in full play, and we're supposed to sympathize with them. I really wish they would have spent more time with that subplot and not get distracted with the subplot of ancient monsters running around. Besides that though, it was nice seeing him realize what he has become and that he too isn't perfect. He had to let go of his pride and anger and understand true brotherly bond.
The CGI animation looked really impressive, and the voice acting was well done. Considering that this was the late Mako's final film role, he did a splendid vocal performance as Splinter before his death. It was also great to have Greg Baldwin do a substantial portion of his dialogue for the finished film. Nolan North, James Arnold Taylor, Chris Evans, Kevin Micheal Richardson, Zhang Ziyi, and Patrick Stewart all stood out the most to me out of the voice cast for their exceptional voice acting and role.
Also, the soundtrack is decent, but I've seen better scores for action films like this.
So even though the protagonists had their flaws and issues, the biggest issue I have with this movie are the use of its villains. The Generals being the final villains for the climax felt so last-minute and unearned because Max Winters had a lot of screen-time, backstory, and build-up to be the new villain for the turtles to face. He was the perfect guy to be the Big Bad, but then the writers threw him away by letting some underdeveloped ancient underlings to betray him out of some fear of losing immortality. There was no build-up to their betrayal or their side of the story, and half of them barely talked at all! That's why I didn't enjoy the final battle too much because of this; it could have been so much better.
So yeah, this film is good and all, but it is far from perfect. Therefore, I will give this a 7/10.
Peace!
I remember this movie and I say it an interesting story for TMNT
I’m interested in checking this movie out myself someday, but I still don’t know whether I’d need to check out the live-action TMNT films first since it’s supposed to be a sequel to them.
What do you think?
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You can watch whichever one you want to watch more.
My only complaint of the movie? We don’t get to see the rest of the Thirteen Monsters! I mean, we only saw Bigfoot, Centaur, the Sloth Monster, Spider Aracknor, a Winged Portal Monster, a monster with long legs, a monster with a massive mouth of sharp teeth, Vampire Succubor, a cephalopod-like monster, the Jersey Devil, and the Sea Monster. In a book called The Legend of Yaotl (which loosely depicts the title character's backstory), the list of the Thirteen Monsters was different.
Other than that, if they did make a direct sequel to this movie, I got an idea of what it might've been:
The four now-mortal Stone Generals are transported to Dimension X, where they meet Krang (voiced by Fred Armisen) and join forces with him in finding the three components of a machine that would transport the alien warlord and his army to Earth. First, the Stone Generals get futuristic versions of their armor and weapons to combat the Turtles, who they want revenge on for preventing their plans to raise an army of monsters to conquer the world. Later on, the Stone Generals use the Dimension X version of the mutagen that gave rise to the Turtles and Splinter to transform into anthropomorphic versions of their animal namesakes while keeping their upgraded armor and weapons. Also, Groundchuck and Dirtbag (both voiced by Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele) make their debuts on the big screen, along with Irma Langstein (voiced by India de Beaufort).