This is a baked-in problem: The Turtles emerged 30 years ago as a tongue-in-cheek parody of such popular comics as Marvel’s “New Mutants” and Frank Miller’s “Ronin,” and then became many times bigger than the things they were supposedly mocking. We’ve reached the obvious apex of summer silliness with this ‘roided-up CGI reboot of the TMNT franchise, which tries not to take itself at all seriously but is too big and expensive to be purely a goof.
We all said, “Turtles!” As she was leaving the theater, amid a phalanx of burly security guards – because she is such a huge star - someone behind me shouted, “You’re so pretty!” Then she informed us that we were all going to do “something fun,” and led the audience, very briefly, in a call-and-response chant: “When I say ‘Ninja,’ you say …” We got it. Anyway, she informed us that she was a “super-fan” of the Turtles as a kid, which I don’t believe for a second, because it’s hard to imagine Megan Fox being a super-fan of anything that isn’t Megan Fox. There may be no difference between those things, which has kind of been the problem with her career. So Megan Fox showed up in person at the screening of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” I attended in Manhattan – along with her co-star Will Arnett, but who cares about him? It’s a bit difficult to tell when Megan Fox is making fun of herself, or the entire world, and when she’s just being Megan Fox.