I think I’ve figured out what it is that Michael Bay is doing wrong.

I don’t know exactly how he does it, but what he seems to be doing is bringing really fun stories to the live-action silver screen while draining as much fun from them as possible. Then he bottles that fun and hoards it, no doubt as part of a nefarious plan to digress from the review and oh… okay, right.

So. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There’s this scene where captured turtles are being drained, literally, with tubes, and it felt just a little too on the nose. Like “this is what I’m doing to this franchise, GET IT?”

It’s not all bad, though. The portrayal of the turtles themselves was fun. The character designs were spectacular, the performances were spot-on, and the dialog was pretty clever. Oh, and the downhill chase scene in the snow was pretty cool, too.

Sadly, the film follows the wrong POV. Perhaps a different actress or a different script could have gotten me to care about April O’Neil’s career as a journalist, but following her around was boring. Also Megan Fox failed completely to convince me that she was an ambitious reporter, anxious to get off of the fluff-piece-of-the-day beat. When the turtles weren’t on the screen, the movie dragged.

The audience at our 10:30pm showing seemed to be predominantly 20-something males, with a few 10-year-olds out late with their parents. This crowd laughed in many of the right places, but it sounded like nervous laughter. These were the laughs people make when they’re desperately hoping this is the point where the movie turns around and gets good. But it wasn’t. It never was. I joined them, laughing as if to believe, but it wasn’t enough.

Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did not destroy my childhood, nor did it ruin my enjoyment of the comics, the Nickelodeon series, or even the side-scrolling video game. It also did not clear the Threshold of Disappointment. If that region is a sewer, then the turtles of  metaphor are probably too on the nose. And their noses looked weird. And this review ended in a strange place.