The "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" earn a Michael Bay-produced 3-D reboot that spares no expense in special effects and spares no decibel in the volume that is the soundtrack to all their new mayhem.
These digitally animated supersized turtles have real-world presence and weight, stumping onto the scene like teenagers who haven't learned to do anything quietly. Their brawls with their trigger-happy foes from the Foot Clan are a blur of body blows and bullets. Their wisecracks are up-to-date, their love of pizza unabated.
Their human friend is a fluff-friendly TV reporter played by Megan Fox. So yeah, Bay gave this production the full "Transformers" treatment. It's entirely too violent, but teenage turtles armed with ninja swords, knives and nunchucks always have been violent, from their origins in the 1980s comic books to assorted TV series and the films of the '90s and an animated flop of 2007.
The new film, directed by Jonathan Liebesman ("Battle Los Angeles") quickly and gracefully handles the back story — a lab experiment and a fire — and puts shapely TV reporter April O'Neil (Fox) on their case right from the start.
The Foot Clan, led by the mysterious megalomaniac Shredder (voiced by Danny Woodburn), wants to take over New York. But these masked vigilantes keep foiling their plans.
April starts to piece together a puzzle that points to her own past, the man her scientist father was in business with (William Fichtner) and the "mutagen" and other chemicals they were toying with.
The heroes are masked ninjas, mutant turtles who grew huge, learned English and trained in martial arts with the inscrutable rat Splinter (Tony Shalhoub). Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo only occasionally act like teenagers, usually in their banter.
"Did you tell her his name?"
