Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows

For F*** Magazine

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS

Director : David Green
Cast : Pete Ploszek, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, Jeremy Howard, Megan Fox, Stephen Amell, Will Arnett, Brian Tee, Tyler Perry, Gary Anthony Williams, Stephen “Sheamus” Farrelly, Brad Garrett, Brittany Ishibashi, Laura Linney, Danny Woodburn, Tony Shalhoub
Genre : Action/Adventure
Run Time : 1 hr 52 mins
Opens : 2 June 2016
Rating : PG (Some Violence)

The world’s most fearsome fighting team has returned to fend off threats old and new – and now, they’re at least a little frustrated that they can’t take credit for it. The brothers Leonardo (Ploszek), Raphael (Ritchson), Michelangelo (Fisher) and Donatello (Howard) have remained in the shadows after defeating Shredder (Tee) a year ago, knowing they will be branded as monsters and reviled. Instead, former cameraman Vern Fenwick (Arnett) is getting all the glory as a New York hero. April O’Neil (Fox) discovers that scientist Baxter Stockman (Perry) is in cahoots with Shredder. After helping Shredder escape from custody, Stockman helps him create mutants of his own: warthog Bebop (Williams) and rhinoceros Rocksteady (Sheamus). Adding to the imminent danger is the alien Krang (Garrett), who plans to open a portal above New York to invade our world. It’s a good thing then that April and the Turtles have a new ally in the form of Casey Jones (Amell), corrections officer by day, hockey stick-wielding vigilante by night.

            2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was not exactly well-received by critics or fans, but a follow-up was inevitable. This time, Dave Green (Earth to Echo) has replaced Jonathan Liebesman in the director’s chair, though the lack of a discernible difference is a sign that the producers, led by Michael Bay, have a particularly strong hand in the proceedings. The tone and style remains pretty much the same from the 2014 movie, with the incorporation of fan-favourite characters and elements of Turtles lore in the hope of winning back the shellheads who were spurned by the previous outing. It’s hard to criticise something like this for being ‘silly’, since it can be argued that the silliness is intentional. However, Out of the Shadows frequently crosses the line from ‘silly’ to ‘stupid’. As we said in our review of the previous movie, Guardians of the Galaxy demonstrated how to do an exuberantly tongue-in-cheek sci-fi action flick loaded with pop culture references while not being embarrassingly juvenile. Guardians of the Galaxy, this most certainly is not.

            The Turtles’ designs haven’t grown on us, we’ve just gotten a little less bothered by it over time. The computer-generated characters are integrated into the live-action environments nicely enough and the visual effects work, while sometimes conspicuous, is generally good. The interpretations of Bebop, Rocksteady and Krang do look acceptable. The action sequences will entertain younger viewers and the involvement of second unit director/stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos (the Fast and Furious movies, Captain America: The Winter Soldier) is a plus. However, nothing strikes us as particularly memorable and the climax with aliens invading New York is quite the yawn, at once too similar to the conclusion of the 2014 movie and to the ending of The Avengers – not to mention any other movie in which extra-terrestrial invaders have seized the Big Apple.

            Perhaps the most positive thing about this film, as with its immediate predecessor, is that our heroes have fun saving the day. Sure, Raph is prone to brooding, but on the whole, they enjoy saving the day and at least a little bit of that is infectious. Characterisation remains paper-thin – the conflict that brews between the brothers is predictable, as is its eventual resolution. While they are sufficiently distinct from each other, not much of an attempt is made to flesh these characters out. It sounds absurd to ask for depth from TMNT, but several of the cartoons, including the current show on Nickelodeon, have succeeded in giving the characters personalities past the single-line descriptions from the theme song.

            Fox remains a poor choice for the role of April O’Neil, and while it is a silly thing to whine about, the character doesn’t even have her signature red hair. There’s a lot of unnecessary leering at Fox and the abbreviated school girl get-up she dons early in the film is a cringe-worthy moment of fan-service. Even the most ardent fans of Arrow would be hard-pressed to deny that Amell isn’t a particularly skilled actor, and his turn as Casey Jones is pretty stiff when the character should be effortlessly cool. He does handle the action beats well, having years of playing a comic book hero under his belt. Perry hams it up as Baxter Stockman, playing him as little more than the, well, stock dweeby scientist. Perry ignores anything interesting about the character, instead becoming yet another comic relief sidekick. It’s also not like he needs the money. Finally, it is truly disheartening to see three-time Oscar nominee Laura Linney absolutely slumming it here.

            Several of the casting changes are nominal improvements – Brian Tee steps in for Tohoru Masamune as Shredder while Brittany Ishibashi replaces Minae Noji as his chief henchwoman Karai. Alas, Shredder does very little and Karai even less.William Fichtner was set to reprise his role as Eric Sacks, though it appears his scenes have been left on the cutting room floor. If you’re able to either overlook or revel in the childishness that runs through most of the movie, it is occasionally entertaining. However, if your tolerance for clunky dialogue, embarrassing jokes and generic action is particularly low, Out of the Shadows will try your patience to no end.

Summary: About on par with the 2014 film, Out of the Shadows is immensely silly and difficult to get into, but its titular heroes are intermittently endearing and the introduction of key players from the comics and cartoons is a half-step in the right direction.

RATING: 2.5 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong 

Mr. Holmes

For F*** Magazine

MR. HOLMES

Director : Bill Condon
Cast : Ian McKellen, Laura Linney, Hiroyuki Sanada, Hattie Morahan, Patrick Kennedy, Milo Parker
Genre : Drama/Mystery
Run Time : 104 mins
Opens : 6 August 2015
Rating : PG

Sherlock Holmes – he’s the greatest detective who ever detected, the greatest sleuth who ever sleuthed and the greatest crime-solver who ever, uh, solved crimes. In this film, we find Sherlock (McKellen) in his twilight years. It is 1947 and a 93-year-old Sherlock has long since retired from detective work, living in a remote farmhouse in Sussex with housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Linney) and her young son Roger (Parker). Holmes has taken up beekeeping, harvesting royal jelly in the hopes of improving his failing memory. He makes a trip to Hiroshima, meeting up with plant enthusiast Matsuda Umezaki (Sanada) in search of the fabled prickly ash, which Sherlock hopes will prove more effective in staving off senility than the royal jelly. In the meantime, he revisits his final case, the case that brought about his self-exile, a case involving the mysterious married woman with a peculiar obsession (Monahan).

The Guinness Book of World Records lists Sherlock Holmes, originally created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as the “most portrayed movie character”. The iconic detective has been played by over 70 actors in more than 200 films and to call Sir Ian McKellen a worthy addition to that pantheon would be an understatement. The character has been through myriad interpretations in his nearly 130 years of existence and Mr. Holmes can stand alongside the recent contemporary re-imaginings of the character, each take bringing something different to the table. This film is based on Mitch Cullin’s novel A Slight Trick of Mind, adapted by screenwriter and playwright Jeffrey Hatcher. Modern audiences have grown enamoured with the BBC series featuring Benedict Cumberbatch’s mercurial, misanthropic Sherlock paired with Martin Freeman’s harried everyman Dr. Watson. Here, we find that Sherlock and Watson’s partnership has dissolved and that Watson has been writing fictionalised accounts of Sherlock’s cases. This is Sherlock at a point of his life that we don’t see too often, but he is by no means less interesting a character.

The film is slowly paced and while there is an element of mystery, it is intended that the audience be captured not by a whodunit but by the enigma of the title character himself. There is a sense of scope to the tale, which sees Sherlock visit a post-Second World War Japan. A moment in which he sees a woman scarred by radiation poisoning and stops in his tracks, shaken, is effectively haunting. A good deal of the film is spent on the bond the elderly Sherlock forms with the precocious Roger, played by Milo Parker, a child actor very much in the Thomas Brodie-Sangster mould. This relationship is given meaningful development rather than being superficially twee. The primary conflict arises from Mrs. Munro’s concern that her son is spending too much time with Sherlock and chasing intellectual pursuits when she means for him to live and work at an inn her sister runs. This feels believable and earned.

The film also takes a meta-fictional look at the cultural impact of Sherlock Holmes, with Sherlock directly addressing the depiction of him wearing a deerstalker hat and smoking a pipe, calling these mere embellishments of Watson’s illustrator. In an amusing scene, Sherlock goes to see a movie based on a book Watson has written about him – the actor playing Sherlock in this film-within-a-film is portrayed by Nicholas Rowe, who played Sherlock in 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes. There is the sense that Sherlock himself is struggling to parse where the legends end and the real person begins. McKellen is able to bring out many colours in his portrayal of Sherlock, fleshing out the character rather than presenting a mere assemblage of tics. Because the use of his mind has been so important to him all his life, it is all the more heart-rending to see Sherlock come to grips with his waning faculties. 

Director Bill Condon paints a picture of Sherlock in which whatever cases the character is working on are secondary, with Sherlock Holmes, “the man beyond the myth” as the tagline puts it, at the fore. For those itching for a whodunit and who derive satisfaction at seeing the great detective unravel labyrinth mysteries, Mr. Holmes won’t quite do the trick. However, as a character study and commentary on the cultural impact of Sherlock Holmes, it is intimate, well-acted and emotional. 

Summary: Once you’ve come to terms with the fact that Mr. Holmes is a character piece rather than a thrilling mystery, it’s easy to embrace Ian McKellen’s stirring portrayal of the iconic detective. 

RATING: 3.5 out of 5 Stars 


Jedd Jong