Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)
★★½ — Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)
There's a moment in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows where someone actually says "cowabunga" without the film treating it as a punchline or a winking in-joke. It's a small thing. But after the grim, self-serious slog of the 2014 predecessor, it felt like a genuine exhale. The filmmakers, clearly having absorbed some of the fan feedback, loosened the collar a bit. And you know what? It shows. Just not quite enough.
This is a better film than its predecessor. I want to be clear about that upfront, even if "better" is doing some heavy lifting here. The pacing is tighter. The brothers actually feel like brothers this time. Mikey gets to be properly funny rather than just irritating, Raph's simmering frustration has some real screen time behind it, and the bond between all four feels slightly more present, more lived-in. These are not small gains. The first film fumbled those basics almost entirely.
And then there's the new blood. Bebop and Rocksteady arrive with exactly the kind of gleeful, over-the-top comic-book energy this franchise has always needed on screen. They're ridiculous, they know they're ridiculous, and the film has enough fun with them to make you wish they'd been given even more room to breathe. Krang, too, finally makes his live-action debut, pink and grotesque and completely mad, nestled inside his giant robot suit like some kind of fever dream rejected by a Saturday morning cartoon. I mean that affectionately. That's exactly what Krang should be.
Stephen Amell turns up as Casey Jones and brings a genuinely earnest charm to the role. He's underused, no question, but he's one of the more likeable human presences the franchise has managed. Which, admittedly, isn't the highest bar in the world, but credit where it's due.
The trouble is that for every step forward, the film drags its old baggage right along with it. The action is still shot in that suffocating, over-processed Michael Bay style, all swirling cameras and CGI so dense it stops reading as anything physical. There are moments where you genuinely can't tell what's happening, not because the choreography is complex, but because the frame is just so cluttered with noise and darkness that your eyes give up trying to parse it. It's exhausting in the wrong way. Compare that to something like Mad Max: Fury Road, which proved that spectacle can be visceral and legible at the same time, and the gap in craft is stark.
The dialogue is bland throughout, the human characters outside of Amell are largely forgettable, and the third act, which hinges on Krang's giant robot stomping about causing chaos, tips from fun-silly into just-silly without quite earning it. The stakes never feel real because the film never slows down long enough to make you care what's at risk. There's a stretch in the middle where the whole thing visibly loses momentum and you feel it, checking in mentally, wondering when the energy's coming back.
It tries to have heart. You can feel it trying. The stuff about the Turtles wanting to be accepted by the surface world, about belonging and identity, that's the emotional engine the story needs. But it keeps getting shunted aside for another set-piece, another quip, another explosion. The franchise has always had that tension between its goofy, colourful roots and the desire to be taken seriously as blockbuster action, and this film hasn't quite figured out how to reconcile the two.
So here we are. Marginally better than the first. Occasionally genuinely fun. Frequently frustrating. Two and a half stars, and I mean every fraction of that half, because it really did try harder, and a few of those moments where it clicks, where the brothers riff off each other or Bebop crashes through something he shouldn't, they do feel briefly like the TMNT I grew up with. I just wish the whole film felt that way. Shell shock, indeed.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2016 | Watched: 2025-09-16
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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