Scene: A suburban Southern California kitchen on a weekday morning in the late '80s or early '90s. Young Josh Bell sits eating breakfast before school and watching his favorite cartoon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Later, he will start recording episodes of the show on a series of VHS tapes, sitting and pausing the VCR during each commercial break so as to have an uninterrupted recording of the show (these are the days before DVD box sets). He has a whole collection of Ninja Turtles action figures. He may also own Ninja Turtles pajamas.
But it's a Saturday-morning-quality take on the characters at best, with unremarkable CGI and a pedestrian, often boring story. Writer-director Munroe wisely sidesteps a reiteration of the Turtles' origin, but he also dispatches with archvillain Shredder in a prologue, leaving the four heroes (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael) to fight a poorly defined supernatural threat, headed by an industrialist voiced by Patrick Stewart.
Character-wise, the focus is on leader Leonardo (Taylor), who at the beginning of the film has decamped to South America for some training and soul-searching. He returns to put the team back together, but gruff loner Raphael (North) feels betrayed by his brother. Their reconciliation forms the story's emotional core and is more interesting than the muddled plot, but it's still sort of dull. The preteen fanboy in me kept searching for something truly exciting in this movie, but, sadly, the critic in me knew that it wasn't there.