
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows movie review: shell schlock
Leaden and witless, though it obviously believes there is humor in its loud, chaotic juvenility. It would be an insult to cartoons to call this cartoonish.

Leaden and witless, though it obviously believes there is humor in its loud, chaotic juvenility. It would be an insult to cartoons to call this cartoonish.

Believes six impossible things — like implausible character motivations, or big emotions — because they’re in the script, without bothering to earn them.

What the heck is this? Some sort of meninist political statement attempting to vindicate male anger? In a kids’ movie? Maybe men shouldn’t make movies…

Teenaged girls behaving badly, depicted with a positive vibe. Progress? Turns out grossout movies don’t work even when they’re kind of feminist.

When FFJ sticks to farce, it works wonderfully, like something P.G. Wodehouse might have loved. But the longer it goes on, the more maudlin it gets.

Could have been assembled entirely from clips from other movies — mostly the Star Wars prequels — and would have been better if it had been.

A sitcom about old men creaking along the Appalachian Trail, reminiscing about slutty girls, and maybe having a stroke at any moment. You know, for fun.

Marvelous. A bouncy comedy mystery adventure parable in a fantasy world meticulously and cleverly conceived and gorgeously realized. I adore this movie.

There is genuine if exasperated warmth here, but it is far less satisfyingly bound up into a cohesive story in this halfhearted retread of the original film.

Spectacularly misogynist. Every single attempt at humor — all of which fail — comes from abusing and humiliating its central female characters as women.