Bringing the comic-book and cartoon characters to live action, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is more charming than a children’s film about talking, radioactive reptiles has any right to be. Oh, it’s still not very good, but its ‘tude could account for why the movie became (until The Blair Witch Project hit) the highest-grossing indie in cinema history. (Up yours, Kurosawa!)

Or maybe it’s because when it comes to denying their kids’ demands to pay to see mediocrity, parents have no backbone.

New York City is deep in a crime wave — good thing this is fiction! — cresting on an increasing series of thefts with no witnesses. Hot on the story is WTRL-TV news reporter April O’Neil (Judith Hoag, I Am Number Four), a curly ginger whom the turtles save from a mugging. She learns that a band of ninjas from Japan is to blame for the stolen goods, and the four turtles help her shut ’em down.

The turtles live in the sewers (no one smells this) with their Asian mentor, a wizened rat named Splinter (voiced by Kevin Clash, aka Sesame Street‘s Elmo) who’s instructed them in the ways of martial arts before he’s kidnapped by the ninjas. He also named them after famous painters, but the hell if I can tell them apart. Color their headbands whatever, but since they all crave pizza and crack groaning puns, they’re indistinguishable to me, aside from whichever one Corey Feldman voices.

Everything out of their mouths is as dumb as the entire concept reads on paper. As a comedy, TMNT is a failure; as action, it’s okay. While loud and senseless, it also manages to be boring and, per director Steve Barron (Coneheads), a little dark — just not dark enough to temper the ill elements, such as the laughable miscasting of Elias Koteas (Shutter Island) as April’s long-haired love interest and the turtles’ hockey stick-wielding accomplice. The best thing about TMNT is the animatronic work by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, but even the worst Muppets movie is better than this by bounds. —Rod Lott

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