Urban legend gets big, brash reconfiguring

FOX. Always a sight for sore eyes.

Does the film world need another “Teenage Mutant Ninja” movie? Ready or not, here comes a big, brash reconfiguring for the digital age of the Ninja Turtles’ once insular urban legend, now expanded to epochal proportions.

The old films’ actors in mascot suits and prosthetics have been replaced in the sequel by their much more antic and expressive digitized versions, and the teen turtle heroes are more clearly delineated on an individual basis.

To keep things more real and human, Megan Fox is tossed into the largely digitized mix as a sassy cub reporter for a TV station who’s the first to reveal the heretofore mysterious crimebusters’ unique and even idiosyncratic identities.

Those crimebusting feats are agreeably eventful, but after a while, we get the feeling that even some of the supposedly real chase scenes are actually digitally achieved, like the very long and complex truck-trailer chase toward film’s end, in which even the “snow action” appears to have been technologically created.

On the minus side, the film’s human villain is not as fearsome as he should be, even if his mechanized (and also digitized) minions are. So, viewers lack the human “connection” needed to anchor the whole shebang in believable fear and trembling.

Megan Fox is always a sight for sore eyes and the Teen Turtles are aw-shucks droll, but we end up still feeling generally disconnected and digitally manipulated—and that’s not a good thing.