Friday 28 February 2020

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time (1993)




When April O'Neil goes shopping for gifts at the local flea market, she happens to pick up a magical sceptre that transports her back to 17th century Japan.  I guess that's the kind of thing you can expect to happen when your best friends are a bunch of teenage mutant ninja turtles and their mutant rat sensei.

Fortunately, when your best friends are a bunch of teenage mutant ninja turtles, you can be pretty sure they will hurl themselves back in time to try and rescue you, even if that means throwing themselves into the middle of a civil war four hundred years in the past.

As a sop to hand-wringing over violence in "a kid's show", the second TMNT film jettisoned the grittier elements of the franchise in favour of slapstick hijinks, and promptly lost over 40% of the box office garnered by the first.  If your first thought is "maybe we should swing the tone back toward more serious and try to shore up the franchise", well you are clearly not a 1990s film executive from Golden Harvest, because their response was "let's just rush out another bit of schlock as cheaply as possible to milk the last dregs out of something that's obviously run its course".

This goes about as well as you can expect, by which I mean "not very".  The turtle costumes and fight choreography are obviously inferior to the prior films, and the plot and dialogue certainly aren't going to make up for any weaknesses on the technical front, because ... well, they're rubbish.  Unfunny slapstick and witless banter is the order of the day.

A waste of your time.

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