Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2014

Action scenes 8\10
Animation 8\10 (except splinter maybe)
Megan Fox 7\10

Story 3\10.

Why does this always happen? Extremely large budget movies have terrible, terrible stories.

One would think that an essence of a movie is the story it's trying to tell,and all the other elements like: special effects, choreography, soundtrack, and so on are there to enforce and help the storytelling. Here it seems that the story is just there to excuse why the fight\action scenes are happening.

When I was watching this, I could hear this conversation in my mind.

-"Mr writer, we want a fight scene here, and a car chase there, make something up."
-"But Sir, it's not making sense story wise."
-"I don't care! We need to have explosions and fights in the trailer! Explosions and fights sell movie tickets, not stories!"

There are a lot of plot holes and nonsensical stuff going on in this movie, here are some that bugged me especially:

1)
Master Splinter learned Martial Arts form a book:

My problem is not that it is logically improbable, but rather that it lacks epicness in the character background.

How did Shredder learn Martial Arts ?

Well he is a Japanese Master who dedicated his life to learning martial arts. He practiced from early age and was instructed by the most knowledgeable masters in Japan.
(Btw why would a Japanese crime lord/Clan leader call himself 'Shredder' in english? But I digress.)

How did Splinter learn Martial Arts?

Well He found a martial arts book with drawings in the sewer.

You see what I mean? It’s not Epic, not Awesome, and yes does not make logical sense.

2)
April's stupid behavior when trying to prove the existence of the crime fighting vigilante:

April being a reporter, wants to air a story about the vigilante ninja turtles who fight back against the bad guys.She knows they exist because she saw them first hand, and also she managed to take an obscure photo of them.
When trying to convince her editor about their existences, she mumbles about some symbols the turtles are leaving as their calling card, about how she saw them and how they fight against evil, but when asked for proof, April comes empty.
So of course she gets fired(I assume because the editor thinks she is crazy.).

In the next scene she goes to an insanely rich guy's house who has been working with her now dead father in the past(Oh, I wonder how would that come to play later).

This guy is obviously a bad guy(I mean seriously, you can figure out he is evil from the first time he appears on screen).So she arrives at his house and shows him the picture of the turtles she had taken.

I’ll say it again, she shows him the proof her editor wanted to see just a few minutes ago, but somehow April forgot about that. For some reason she thought “Look at all those symbols around the city, they must be somehow connected to the vigilante.” Is a much more convincing argument then “Here is a freaking picture of them! Look!”.

Did she forget about the existence of this photo ? Did getting fired jogged her memory?

3)

Evil guys motivation for being well... Evil.

The first two points I can forgive, but this one really ruined the movie for me.

This movie doesn't offer any explanation why the bad guys want to 'Take over the world' or New York city in this case. There is no sense of what they are trying to achieve besides being evil just for the sake of it.

Their plan is to release a poison in New York and because they have the only antidote to it, they would sell it or get a government contract to manufacture it or whatever, and the rich guy would become rich-er while Shredder's clan would get to "rule".

Let's ignore for a second that this particular evil plan was used to death, what's the point of this? What will you gain?

Let's say it works and you do get rich-er ... But you are filthy rich as it is, and you already have like 10 companies who have their hands in all the pots.
There is: Obviously-Evil-Guy's construction company,Obviously-Evil-Guy's medical company, Obviously-Evil-Guy's science company and so on.
What would be the point of your evil plan if you already have all that?

And what is Shredder's motivation in all this? So the obviously evil rich guy gets rich-er and Shredder gets what exactly? He could rule the city? What that even mean? What would he gain from ruling it? What's the point of ruling a city that you just bombed with chemical weapons and killed half the population?
Also what do you mean by ruling? What like a king? You want to be the King of New York? To what end ?

If by 'ruling' you mean being the dominant criminal gang, than thats what you already are…

So the dominant criminal gang leader wants to attack the city with chemical weapons so his gang could become the dominant criminal gang in the city and he would be the dominant criminal gang leader ? Makes no sense whatsoever.

My opinion about whether or not this movie would be better without Megan Fox:
Short Answer:No.
This movie has so many faults that with or without Megan Fox it's pretty bad.If the writing budget was cut because how much it costs to bring Megan Fox onboard than perhaps it could be better. That being said, I don't think she did a bad job.Her acting was fine, I didn't feel like it was urged or artificial too much.Except for the scene in the beginning where April is reporting about ‘bird summer fitness’ or something. However I think the acting in that scene was bad intentionally. Showing that the character of April does not really wants to do this kind of work.

Being a bad actor is not the same as being an actor who plays a character who is a bad actor.

In conclusion, if what you want in your movies is fight scenes, car chases and awesome cgi, this is a movie for you.

If on the other hand you have a brain, and it bugs you when a movie makes zero sense, then don’t bother.

I have to say that this was a rather “meh” experience. It certainly was not an improvement over the original. Why try to rewrite a story that was actually not bad when you cannot be bothered to spend some effort on it? The new story is sloppy and it is rather clear that whoever wrote it got only two directives: Make sure that Megan Fox gets a lot of focus and if you do not know what to write then cram in some special effects. There are a lot of special effects in this movie!

It is obvious that Megan Fox’s ego have had a lot of influence on the movie. To the extent that you might wonder if this movie is about the turtles or about Megan Fox. She might be the wet dream of some less discerning teenagers but her acting skills leaves somewhat to be desired. Okay, okay she was actually not too bad in this movie but then it was not to difficult to shine in this movie either.

There are a few moments when it looks like it is going to turn interesting. For instance when the shredder is first introduced and punishes some of his underlings but rather quickly he is reduced to just another “special effect” when they slap this robotic shredder suit onto him. Come on, he is supposed to be a skilled martial arts combatant, not some freak in a robotic suit.

Splinter was just sad. Some lab rat that picked up martial arts from a book he found in the sewers! What the f…? That ruined a lot of the movie.

The turtles themselves, being already pushed back somewhat into the background by Megan Fox desire to be in front of the cameras most of the time, are bland to say the least. They are immature, even for a movie like this, and the jokes are simply unintelligent and mostly not very funny.

I was about to write that, if you like special effects and do not care for much of the rest, then you will probably like this movie but when I think back even the special effects where often only mildly interesting. They were perhaps not really bad but not very impressive either. The truck ride down a snowy slope was just silly and some of the scenes where actually rather underwhelming for instance.

On the whole, to me, this was a mildly entertaining movie that could have been much better if someone with basic intelligence had been asked to write the script in the first place. There are actually five (!) people credited with writing this movie and maybe that is the problem. Too many cooks!